Facebook is a wonderful, terrible thing.
Yes, I do realize that this post is a bit late in regards to when we were supposed to have watched Eli Pariser’s TED talk Beware Online “Filter Bubbles”. However, Facebook is such a phenomenon, and I realize how big of a role it plays in my life. It’s quite concerning, really. (Do we realize how much of our lives we waste just scrolling down a News Feed?)
Pariser’s TED talk shines a harsh, unforgiving light on Facebook’s most intimate algorithms, exposing its secret of how it shows you just what you want to see. He goes on to explain how he is a liberal-progressive, but he has both liberal and conservative friends on Facebook. One day, he realized that none of his conservative friends’ posts were appearing on his News Feed, and set out to figure out what was going on.
It turns out that a lot of internet sites, such as Yahoo, Google, and Netflix, start showing you only what they think you want to see or things that relate to you, based on things like where you’re sitting, what device you’re using, and your history of sites visited.
If we only think about our time on the Internet with the purpose of pleasure or relaxation, then this algorithm is brilliant. We only see what we want to see (flying cats or the new Hunger Games trailer) and not necessarily what we need to see (the Arab Spring or Malala Yousafzai’s ordeal).
Let’s be real here. As human beings, we like to be right. We don’t like people disagreeing with us. So when we go on Facebook and Google and all those other search engines, we click on links and people’s profiles that interest us because they agree with us. This is significant because of the how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm really works. This blog post gives us the breakdown of how posts get ranked in the News Feed. One of the three parts of the algorithm is affinity, which is how much we interact with the people who post. So the amount we click on links and people’s profiles that interest us because they agree with us has a lot to do with what our News Feed is comprised of, and that’s why we love Facebook so much.
Why does this matter? Our CAP stream is Global Citizens, but that doesn’t mean for a second that we’re global citizens and nobody else is. As the world gets smaller through increasing interconnectedness on the web, our status as global citizens gets more important. We need to be informed about what’s going on with typhoon relief aid in the Philippines or the Iran nuclear program negotiations. Where do we find out about these events? And where are we spending increasing amounts of our time? The answer to both of these questions is the Internet.
Here’s the challenge that I’ve been giving myself lately: spend time on the Internet intentionally. When I log onto Facebook, I want to scroll through my News Feed not just for entertainment, but with a purpose of absorbing information and views that I don’t necessarily agree with. This is part of my role as a global citizen. Eli Pariser was right when he said that it’s not about what we want to see, it’s about what we need to see.
Your challenge to yourself to spend time deliberately on the Internet is quite interesting. What Eli Pariser’s claim brought up for me was the idea that the internet is becoming a marketplace, it is being commodified. I do not just mean this in terms of advertisements but also in terms of information. We see the advertisements that apply to us and we see the information that we think applies to us. But that information is only a representation of how Facebook and Google see us. In order to break that chain it is important to do what you suggest and deliberately click on and search for the information that is not readily given to us. Engagement with the internet cannot be so placid and easygoing. We should all be challenging ourselves to engage with the internet and seek out new, and sometimes upsetting, information in order to broaden our perspectives and truly be global citizens.
Allison, I feel that it is ironic that while the internet has the ability to broaden our knowledge and make us more easily aware of what is happening around the world, with the creation of Facebook and its algorithms, we are receiving the opposite effect where we are being bombarded more about information of our friends’ personal lives instead of the global news. Facebook is making us more close minded because it is tailoring towards our main interest of closely knowing other people’s lives. Lastly, I really liked how you related this idea to global citizens. I also believe that global citizens have a duty to be very open-minded and critical with the information they perceive on the internet. As global citizens, I think we will have a difficult task of figuring out what information we are not receiving. However, I liked your solution of “spend[ing] time on the Internet intentionally” that I might want to try doing it as well.