Is filter bubble the real problem

“Filter bubble” or “Self-satisfy bubble”

Recently, we watched Eli Parser’s TED talk about something he’d like to call the “filter bubble” in class. His aim was the irrationality of the existence of filter bubble on almost every social medias and searching engines (for example Google and Facebook). The automatic personalization of search and related technologies brings up the fact that users will only able to see those informations that supported their general viewpoints and rarely obtain any informations or ideas that contradicted theirs. After a while, users of these apps become isolated in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. Admittedly, the existence of the filter bubble might be real, but Eli Parser’s claim that indicates the “filter Bubble” the arch-criminal that narrows people’s mind is just different from the truth.

Google gives us different result though searching the same thing

 

There is a phenomenon similar to the “filter bubble” named “confirmation bias” reminded us by  Alexander Zwissler. This noun basically suggest that it is every human’s nature to seek those informations that confirms opinions we already believe to be true but dismissing any information that contradicts these “devotional” beliefs. Every human being tend to do so. With this tendency, one choose only those websites that please him while surfing on internet, make only the friends that shares the same idea as him, and go only the place that packed with the people on his side. These actions is also called the Self-selected personalization, in another word one choose how he want to think of his world. For example, a person who opposes immigration might want to avoid information that specifies how much a country has gained due to immigration, while paying a lot of attention to news stories about problems related to immigration.

The existence of filter bubble is actually based on the information that you are constantly searching. If you are the kind of people that are able to avoid this “potential confirmation bias” and listen, watch, talk about various sorts of things, the knowledge you obtain will be diversiform, and the search engine will not narrow your search result if you click at the websites that have entirely different idea. While admitting the existence of the “filter bubble”, Pre-selected personalization, we cannot ignore the fact about this “confirmation bias” as the self-selected personalization. Filter bubble might only exist on social media and searching engine. but the self-selected personalization exist in every human’s mind, and causing the filter bubble to reach the maximum disadvantage for them. You could say that filter bubble is removing and narrowing the information, but those are the information that people want to see, no matter if there is or is not a filter bubble, people will always tend to click on those website. In this way, filter bubble is not the thing that we should concern about, it can be consider as a program that is developed by people themselves. Even if you completely delete this program, there will always be new program coming out, with problem. If you can’t get rid of the true issue from the “programmer”, you will never get a good and clean program.

We only see those that favor our beliefs

 

To sum up, the existence of filter bubble is proved to be true by many experiments. Nonetheless, that shouldn’t be the problem to concern if we want to solve the problem of getting single sided information. One can only be clear when he step outside of his own bubble, look at every thing from the each sides with all sorts of information obtained. What we should avoid isn’t the little program called “filter bubble”, but the “Self-satisfy bubble” that created by the programer, ourself.