Being Online May Be a Normative Experience

According to Eli Pariser, all internet users should be aware of “filter bubbles” In the form of algorithims. These bubbles are apparently designed to monitor your attraction to a specific behavior or attitude within a communication, and then, without prior consultation with you, to send you similar offerings for your increased pleasure and approval. (Less “agreeable” postings are eventually crowded out or sent away.) The idea seems to be that the enormous weight of all these similar offerings will end up creating a new standard of correctness for the user. Complete validation by frequent repetition. If Facebook, Google, Netflicks, Six Word Memoirs, Post-Secrets, and other social networking sites all seem to be shaping themselves  to attract followers by giving their followers more of what they seemed to like in the first place, what will be in the future for online users? A family gathering, on an occasion such as a Thanksgiving Dinner, will probably not offer them the same validation. People around the table might possibly disagree. The one who disagrees with you is called a second turkey on Six Word Memoir. Was the feast not enough to give pleasure? It worked in the off-line past.There are also Wild Turkey and Xanax to take away the pain of the Thanksgiving. Are face-to-face social interactions so difficult that alcohol or drugs must be taken to make them bearable? Visible pleasure does appear in the end from the creation of the Six Work Memoirs about Thanksgiving in a Comedy Central fashion. I hope their postings were anonymous. They might otherwise be in trouble.

 

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