I remember back when the issue of filter bubbles started being a big deal, or at least started being a big deal in my circle of friends. In middle school we started noticing that on GMail, Google would place specific ads based on our emails or search history. Then Facebook started doing it a few years later, and now I guess everyone's doing it. I think the real concern with the idea of the filter bubble nowadays, a whole three years after Pariser's TED Talk, is that the filters really have kind of completely taken over the web.
Google uses your information to give you more options that are similar to what you already search, Facebook filters out posts that it thinks you don't have interest in, even on our smartphones there are filters set up that are made to pander to what an algorithm thinks we want to hear. This is different from a self-initiated filter, and concerning, because we have no say in the matter, or at the very least we're required to jump through a lot of hoops in order to disable this kind of filter. In the example of Facebook, Pariser suggests that we opt to keep our data private, but Facebook doesn't really want you to do that, and makes it kind of hard. I don't even think you CAN stop Google from customizing your search options.
The other problem with this kind of filtered society we live in is that it's almost a necessary one. In one of my other classes we've been studying the idea of a "participatory culture" on the web, meaning that everyone gets a chance to author and participate in the creation of information. This is largely a good thing, but at the same time, it's the root cause of the web filter mentality. If you have naught but intelligent, well-meaning friends on Facebook, then at the worst, Facebook is removing valuable and different opinions as Pariser stated in his own personal example. But let's look at the typical demographic of Facebook users. Most of them are teenagers, and they have a lot of friends. And I mean a lot. I doubt anyone actually has 500+ friends in real life that they care about and talk to, it's just not realistic, but lots of facebook users have incredible amounts of friends. Unfortunately, not all of those friends are going to have something interesting and important to say. In fact, I would be willing to bet that a large majority of them have pretty stupid, asinine commentary. Those people are ones I don't care about. I WANT their crap out of my feed. And there's the problem. In a web so over-saturated with meaningless information, we HAVE to filter to an extent or it's impossible to get any useful information.
As such, it very much falls to the user to keep filter culture from affecting their lives too greatly. The web can't change itself, at least not for one person, and so I think it's up to individuals to seek out their own information that might be filtered out. It's not the easy road, and in a perfect world, the filters set up would be sophisticated enough to filter information in a more meaningful way, but as it is, there's just no way to block all the crap as well as give you what you need but maybe don't want. Technology isn't that smart.
Friday, February 7, 2014
Blog 2 - Digital Nation: Unflattening our Discourses on Technology
In Nass' documentary on multitasking, or rather, the illusion of multitasking, he argued that, while an increasing number of people, especially in the college demographic, believe themselves to be quite adept at the art of multitasking, that is, focusing on many different things at once, an idea brought on by our increasingly digital era, where every student has a phone, ipod, computer, etc running at the same time, these people are often not as skilled as they might like, and in fact, this multitasking society that we have created may slowly be killing our ability to think critically and work efficiently.
Personally, I think this viewpoint is a little reactionary. Certainly the science behind what Nass was arguing is valid. A person is always going to be at their most efficient when they are focusing on one thing and one thing alone. However, this method of doing things doesn't work in the real world anymore.
In a lot of ways, technology, and the ability it gives us to do multiple things at once, is a huge benefit to society. Take this picture above. The person here has facebook on their computer and twitter on their phone. Nass would probably argue that this kind of thing only limits our ability to do either task efficiently, but I personally disagree. I think it depends on what is meant by "efficiency." If you're on facebook on your laptop, and you want to tweet something, you'd have to open a new tab (or new window if you're stuck in the 90's), log into twitter, tweet whatever it is, and then migrate back to facebook and resume whatever you were doing there. Sure that whole exchange probably takes like 25 seconds, but still. If you have these apps on your phone, you can leave facebook up on your computer, pull up twitter on your phone, keep looking at facebook while it loads, jot down your tweet, and then resume what your were doing on your laptop, never really losing focus on either thing.
This idea relates a lot to the idea of what Nass described as "entertaining ourselves to death." His standpoint was that we're so wired and constantly looking at so many different things: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, Email, Texts, etc, that we can't possibly focus on the important matters in life. Moving into the theory of "Always On," I think this idea, that people today are always on some kind of networked device, is the core to debunking the idea of entertaining ourselves to death. If someone from, say, the 19th Century, whose only forms of information were books, and whose only forms of communication were literally talking to someone or sending a letter, were suddenly thrust into our society and given a cell phone, this idea of being entertained to death would be valid. The poor guy would be overwhelmed with the novelty and efficiency of this new power, and would likely lose sight of real life.
However, people today are born into this kind of always on world, and are exposed to the veritable smorgasbord of technology that surrounds us from day one. As such, while it certainly does affect our ability to do certain things, the constant use of technology we have is far from debilitating to the point of killing us.
Personally, I think this viewpoint is a little reactionary. Certainly the science behind what Nass was arguing is valid. A person is always going to be at their most efficient when they are focusing on one thing and one thing alone. However, this method of doing things doesn't work in the real world anymore.
This idea relates a lot to the idea of what Nass described as "entertaining ourselves to death." His standpoint was that we're so wired and constantly looking at so many different things: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, Email, Texts, etc, that we can't possibly focus on the important matters in life. Moving into the theory of "Always On," I think this idea, that people today are always on some kind of networked device, is the core to debunking the idea of entertaining ourselves to death. If someone from, say, the 19th Century, whose only forms of information were books, and whose only forms of communication were literally talking to someone or sending a letter, were suddenly thrust into our society and given a cell phone, this idea of being entertained to death would be valid. The poor guy would be overwhelmed with the novelty and efficiency of this new power, and would likely lose sight of real life.
 |
| What am I supposed to DO with this thing? |
However, people today are born into this kind of always on world, and are exposed to the veritable smorgasbord of technology that surrounds us from day one. As such, while it certainly does affect our ability to do certain things, the constant use of technology we have is far from debilitating to the point of killing us.
Blog 1 - Why Study The Internet
In outlining the necessary steps in order to analyze the web in a Sphere, Foot professes the need to archive information presented to us. While his methodology does not actually include social networking, I believe it would be possible, and indeed perhaps quite simple, to include social media sites in this sort of web sphere analysis.
Upon taking this sort of task on, one might think the idea of archiving all the interactions amongst users, especially on a social networking site, to be a daunting, if not impossible task. But is it really any different than trying to archive the interactions between people elsewhere? Just because these sites see a greater degree of traffic than others, and certainly more interaction, does that really make it less likely for us as analysts to archive the goings on between people? I think not.
In fact, the mere nature of the social media networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, make it easier than it would be otherwise to monitor the interactions between people and the "bits of content," as Foot describes them. As an example, let's look at a typical Twitter post:
Ignore the content, but let's look at what information it gives us. Not only does the post impart the information the user was getting at, we have two other important bits of data that are very conducive to Web Sphere Analysis. One of those is the hashtag. By itself this is a pretty meaningless phrase, but the nature of hashtags is that they spread, and many users end up adding them. In this way, we have a built in way of tracking the flow of similar thoughts and the passage of specific "bits of data," without having to do practically any work. Second, we can see at the bottom who's "retweeted" the post, another way of allowing us to easily see the flow of site-based interaction.
In Foot's study of 9-11, he found that personal sites were the most allowing of expression of both types. If we were to do a similar study, using the Boston Marathon Bombing, and including Social Networking sites, I anticipate that the primary location of either type of expression would shift to networking locations, specifically Facebook and Twitter. These types of sites have somewhat replaced personal sites for uses of expressing one's opinion. Why take the time to create and author a blog about your opinion when you can reach a wider audience with ease on a social media site?
Upon taking this sort of task on, one might think the idea of archiving all the interactions amongst users, especially on a social networking site, to be a daunting, if not impossible task. But is it really any different than trying to archive the interactions between people elsewhere? Just because these sites see a greater degree of traffic than others, and certainly more interaction, does that really make it less likely for us as analysts to archive the goings on between people? I think not.
In fact, the mere nature of the social media networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, make it easier than it would be otherwise to monitor the interactions between people and the "bits of content," as Foot describes them. As an example, let's look at a typical Twitter post:
In Foot's study of 9-11, he found that personal sites were the most allowing of expression of both types. If we were to do a similar study, using the Boston Marathon Bombing, and including Social Networking sites, I anticipate that the primary location of either type of expression would shift to networking locations, specifically Facebook and Twitter. These types of sites have somewhat replaced personal sites for uses of expressing one's opinion. Why take the time to create and author a blog about your opinion when you can reach a wider audience with ease on a social media site?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)