Neuroscience, the scientific study of how our brains work, has shown us that our brains function and communicate with the rest of our body through neural connections, thus resulting in thoughts, emotions, actions, and reactions (Psychology Today, n.d.). It has shown us that we are, quite literally, hard-wired to find connections with each other without needing extrinsic motivation to do so (Cook, 2013). I think this explains my initial reaction to viewing the above graph: the first thing I wanted to do was to see who had picked the same songs as me.
In a similar vein, this also explains most peoples’ reactions to search engine algorithms. Most people do not sit and wonder how their brain carries messages back and forth, considering how their fingers know which keystrokes to perform, just as most people don’t wonder how Google yields the search results it does. However, as we have seen throughout the course, the meaning of the connection is important, and yet it is often unknown (or unconfirmed) unless we actively pursue it.
It is clear that these connections between selected songs and curators do not explain their motivation or reasoning for why they did (or didn’t) select a track. And yet, the connection that I feel when I see that several others also selected Mozart’s Queen of the Night Aria from The Magic Flute does not need to be correct for me to feel it, or create it in my mind: we made the same selection, therefore the weight of our link between us as human nodes increases, ever so slightly. And since our brains are wired to seek out these social links (Cook, 2013), we then project the internet as a social being and assign the links as a way of feeling connected with others. This can clearly turn sour, not just in what we are steered to see by algorithms (seeing the same or similar things over…and over…and over again) but also in the biases contained in the algorithms themselves (Vallor, 2018).
As much as we think this graph tells us, it is also evident by the line of questioning in the assignment description that there is a lot that it does not tell us:
- Is the visualization able to capture the reasons behind the choices? No
- Does it reflect the choices we did not make? No
- Do the connections and communities exist due to profound similarities in political views, occupation, or preferred social activities? No, it only exists because people clicked on the same response on the quiz.
This assignment reminded me that a) we automatically seek connections, as social beings; b) those connections sometimes don’t matter beyond a sense or feeling of similarity, and c) knowing about a and b can make us more alert to consider the connections the web presents to us and whether we actually see the connections we think we are seeing.
References
Cooke, G. (2013, October 22). Why we are wired to connect. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-are-wired-to-connect/
Course Notes, Module 9.1 page. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/96891/pages/9-dot-1-what-is-the-web-and-what-is-not?module_item_id=4377874
Psychology Today. (n.d.). What is neuroscience? Retrieved August 11, 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/neuroscience
Santa Clara University. (2018). Lessons from the AI Mirror Shannon Vallor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40UbpSoYN4k