According to Eli Praiser’s Filter Bubble theory, the social medias itselves selects the categories of information on the internet for the viewers, and create an environment on what the viewers more interested in. However, Eli does not agree with the these personalising on the internet, since the internet only gives what it thinks we want to see, but not necessary what we need to see. I agree with this point of view.
Internet is a way for people to explore and find out the information all over the world. This ability gives people different points of view from all around the world, which put different contexts into the discussion. During this process, it helps people to have more and more details about the informations, and can reach the news with more comprehensive opinions. The environment with the conflict between opinions can help to develop the insight of the problems, which help to create more suggestions that helps to solve, or say, balance, the social problems we are now facing, such as conflict between politics and different foreign policy. However, when the internet closes down the options for us, we got only the information that we view more, and we can not realize it, since we can not tell what actually changed in the web. Although we are still viewing the same social medias, what we are viewing changed already, and this can cause a large problem. For example, a viewer is usually in the middle between democrats and republicans, he views balancedly between the information and news between these two groups. However, one day he found a really interesting democratic article, so he used a lot of time on reading it, and opened several more pages about the article. Then the internet records that he used more time on democrats than on republican that day, so they change his viewing information to more democratic information. In the end, this viewer becomes a democratic because the change in content of what he is viewing by the internet. This example shows that the internet-create filter bubbles are not available for people, since a lot of people who have neutral opinion can be lead to one side of the opinion.
On the other hand, the filter bubble created by internet can influence people’s life by blocking them from what they are not agree with. Imagine there is only a web page that contains all the opinions and comments that the viewer agrees to, the viewer can not know what others opinions are, then, within an environment with just agreements, the viewer can become more and more close to oneself’s opinion, and become aggressive towards other kinds of opinion that are not in the same route with the viewer. This can be a huge problem for online discussions, that it may become quarrels because people would not accept other opinions.
Finally, Eli raised a great opinion that internet helps to build democracy. However, I do not think the personalized website should be apart of it; In fact, it is the opposite of democracy. People got “blocked” from the information they actually need, instead, they got what they are “interested” in, but in the end, nothing necessary. In this way, people actually can not connect themselves to the world.
What people need are not design-for-one-only web page, they need to know all the information to have comparison, which makes it more easier to view the world and build self opinions. The filter bubbles are not helping people in viewing internet, since people can not get informations when they actually want to see things with details. Internet can never predict what a viewer really want to view, because occasion happens, and then people start to getting things from the filter bubbles from internet. People should have their own filter bubbles, created one will never meet the requirements of changing opinions of people surfing on internet.
21st Century Citizenship 