Recently, I have been weary of Facebook. In fact, this spring I quit Facebook in an effort to “cleanse” myself of it. Facebook has an intrusive nature that I had become increasingly uncomfortable with. When I reactivated my account in order to do homework for English class, I was quickly reminded of why I quit. Interestingly enough, we are currently studying a few of the very reasons I decided to take a step back from it.

In Eli Pariser’s Ted Talk he discusses the personalization of what we see on Facebook and of the internet in general, namely in our Google searches. He argues that our experiences on the internet differ greatly from one another, and that the “gatekeepers” of the internet are essentially personalizing our individual experience, leaving out what they think we don’t want or need to see. While this allows us to see content that we are interested in or that is relevant to our lives, we are unaware exactly what it is that we are missing out on. When I think of these internet “gatekeepers” that Pariser talks about, I can’t help but imagine Winston Smith from George Orwell’s novel, 1984. In this dystopian novel, Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, where he controls propaganda and rewrites past newspaper articles so that they are in line with the current government’s regime. Although this is definitely a much more extreme example of what we’re dealing with here, we are still missing out on crucial information and the choice of what we are seeing, is not ours. Unlike in Orwell’s novel, these “gatekeepers” are not promoting one oppressive message in their attempts to personalize our experience, however they are censoring us from information and this is an unsettling similarity. One of the most disturbing aspects of Orwell’s novel is that the people living under this oppressive system are unable to make the choice, and this is what Pariser suggests – that we need to be able to see what gets through our filters and what doesn’t so that we can have some control, and I most definitely agree.