See the Bubble, Be the Bubble, Pop the Bubble

The filter bubble happens when a website, or even Google, uses complex algorithms to filter search results that best suit you based on past searches or sites you visit often. The Filter bubble prevents us from seeing everything, and limits the results to what the internet thinks you want to see. This affects how we see government. For example, if someone is a democrat, sites and certain social media’s feeds only present those views instead of trying to educate the individual on a political event. It creates ignorance and a block between the political parties which causes confusion and conflict. This could be problematic in a growing presence of youth on social media.

The filtering of current or political events for something more lighthearted could directly affect the way younger generations understand what’s happening around them, and in turn, affect the future of our country. Filter bubble promotes the idea that your view is the only, or right view, which causes problems when trying to have a discussion with people who disagree with you.

As a nation, it is our job to be good, law abiding, and educated citizens, and the filter bubble may cause some confusion and refusal to accept others opinions or make the ability to open up your mind. Places from Facebook to search engines like Google filter the internet to show what they want you to see, regardless of what you need to see, and this affects how you perceive things or how you understand what’s going on locally, nationally, or globally, which could negatively impact our nation in the future. However, stopping the filter bubble can be difficult as we tend to only read things that make us happy or what we agree with. It is crucial that as a growing nation we collectively and individually look into the topics that are hard for us to read. This includes politics that may be discouraging to read or understand.

As Eli Pariser explains in “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’”, the filter bubble is like junk food, and we all love junk food no matter how “bad” it is for us. In order to stop ignorance caused by “junk food” results, we need to take a look into “healthy foods” which would be trying to maneuver around the filter bubble. It’s going to be hard to step away from junk food results and start a healthier outlook even though we know junk food results are bad for us, or easier to understand. Our minds are constantly ingesting information that we see online, and it is important that we are giving our minds an even balance of impulsive easy information and information that may be hard to take in.

In order to pop the bubble we must be willing to look at other perspectives and views. Doing this means doing more research on certain topics that may be hard for you to read, but it is necessary for us to pop the bubble that we so comfortably live in. This will create an understanding and take a smaller step to removing ignorance from our online presence as well as being more educated politically and otherwise.