Daniel Pink 6 Senses Class Site

Friday, October 19, 2012

"Filter Bubbles" on the Internet

     In a video and an article, Eli Pariser discusses the dangers of "filter bubbles" on the internet. He basically describes how search engines such as Google, and social media websites such as Facebook, are curtailing exactly what we see. At a first glance it may seem to be a positive thing, doesn't everyone want an individualized Facebook and Google search results? But the problem lies in the fact that Facebook and Google is doing this automatically for us, without us even realizing it. Even if we do realize it, there isn't a setting available to "un-mask" or "disable" these filters that the computer whizzes have set up with a program.  It makes me draw parallels to the problem of traditional history textbooks that barely consist of minority figures and women. The students then learn a history where these groups are usually missing, or just peppered in at certain stages of history, and then they just seem to vanish from history. If the student is not seeing them in their textbook, they are seeing a history that is incomplete. Similarly the Google results may be tailored to us, but we are also seeing a very incomplete Google search list of results.

In the video, Pariser shows two different Google results for Egypt. Although the date is much different, I decided to take a screenshot of my Google results for Egypt. What did you come up with? Different or similar?

3 comments:

  1. I really like your parallels to history--very insightful! Also my google of Egypt is similar to yours, except that a link to tourism shows up before news stories; it's interesting to think about where these differences lie!

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    1. Thanks for trying the Google search! It is interesting to think about the differences in the results. I'm really wondering if our colleagues will get some starkly different results.

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  2. Wouldn't it be nice if we could unmask or defilter our search results? I think it is very controlling that Google,etc does it automatically for us even though these search engines don't know who exactly we are. They are just using assumptions..

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