Wait Can They Do That?
How can the use of technology bring about the lightest and brightest moments as well as some of the darkest moments know to mankind? Technology has brought old friends together, families closer and 24/7 learning to a new height. Technology has also ruined lives with pictures, stories and videos that were never meant to be shared. Technology has affected almost every aspect of living in the world today. Just knowing how technology works, is not the biggest hurdle for using technology. Digital Citizens need to be aware of the grand scope of the digital world.
The video by Eli Pariser, Beware of “Filter Bubbles” was an eye opener for me. I have watched several people on Facebook copying and pasting the post. I have not been able to see all of their friends' posts, if you are experiencing the same thing, copy and paste this post and ask those friends to respond to you in a comment, then like magic your “lost friends” reappear. Watching this video explained this issue very clearly. The friends that have been lost is because you haven’t clicked on their posts and they haven’t commented on your posts. This magic is not magic at all. The magic is algorithms. The algorithms say that you haven’t paid much attention to this information so it must not be important to you.
I watched the video twice and I shared it with my co-workers and my students. Every post gets 57 signals that Google looks at when you access something on the computer (TED, 2011). These measurements are used to better tailor your query results. It’s not just using your cookies to decide want you bought last week and send like products to hope to grab interest in a impulse buy. The signals record where you are, what device you are using, the regular websites you use and the general items you usually search for. The collection of this information LIMITS the full internet, a full search. My Google Search gives different search results from any other person based on my online existence.
This is one reason that technology users, need more education as digital citizens. It isn’t Facebook taking away friends, it’s not Google catering to things just the way you like it. It is technology companies limiting results and possibly limiting free thinking. A long as all the cards on the table when we decide to play, the game can go as we choose. Consumers and digital citizens need to arm themselves with all the fine print in the rules of the game. Maybe, we need to “pop” those filter bubbles sometime and see more of the World Wide Web.
TED. (2011, May 02). Beware online "filter bubbles" | Eli Pariser.
Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
