The Filter Bubble

After a long time indeed, this blog is seeing something.

This one is based one nice piece of research on Times Crest edition called “The Filter Bubble”. What follows hence is essentially a rehash of that plus a few comments from the devil (an of course thy flame of wit!).

Let me start with Facebook and Google. Everything is personalized and customized right from, your friend suggestions your search prompters, your recommended videos. How this works, is by an extensive analysis of all your past data. So in essence what these applications do is cocoon you in your existing range of capabilities and frame of your mind. Eli Pariser's, has coined the terminology “The Filter Bubble”,  to refer to this excessive personalization, he says "Personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible auto propaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown. "

To add on to the above thought the filter bubble keeps us from discovering new and novel ideas, and areas of work. You do not automatically befriend a person just because 10 of your existing acquaintances know him/her. You would still like to know what is happening in someone life who is not Facebook crazy but nonetheless would figure in your list of real friends. You do not like a piece of information or a video because you have watched similar ones earlier. You may actually prefer something that is not captured by your past record of web activity

But fair is fair, Facebook and Google and other software’s on the web do allow all these filters to be turned off, although you have to navigate a bit for finding them in the settings.

So in essence it may be wise to turn of “igoogle” and of course pick the phone and call someone whose “updates” have not appeared in you Facebook page!