nina de jesus is a digital projects librarian on Mississauga land. Interests include digital preservation, information ethics, and long walks on the beach. nina conducts experiments on her life as performance art in an attempt to resist, challenge, and inspire discourse on #libtechwomen. This post originally appeared on nina’s blog.
The basic notion of the filter bubble is that personalization on the internet (with google search, facebook, etc) creates this individualized spaces where we only see things we already agree with, stuff that confirms our points of view, rather than stuff that challenges us or makes us uncomfortable.
The first and most glaring problem with this idea is that it wholly makes this into a technological problem when it is a social problem.
On the whole, we actually know this. Idioms like “birds of a feather flock together” suggest that we have a very basic, folk understanding that people tend to stick with other people who are like them. This is something that holds true in pretty much every social arena that you care to pick. From the moment we are born, we already exist in a filter bubble. A bubble that is determined by many factors outside of our control: race, gender, class, geography, etc.
Eli Pariser mentions that he is from Maine. Which is one of the least racially diverse states in the US, with 95% of the people in the 2010 US Census reporting that they are white. The fact that he is able to posit filter bubbles as a predominantly technological problem while growing up in one of the most racially segregated and homogenous states in America is… well. Exactly how my point is proven.
The thing is. Say he successfully solves the technological problem. How will this, in anyway, deal with the fact that his home state’s demographics precludes most of the white inhabitants from ever actually encountering a person of colour in real life? Where, arguably, it is far more critical that we don’t have filter bubbles so that we can experience the humanity of other people, rather than just being exposed to facts/articles/whatever.
This also explains why his solution won’t work. As the recent piece about polarization on Twitter demonstrates… Most people don’t bother seeking out stuff that disagrees with them. This is stark on a site like Twitter, where your timeline is still chronological feed, rather than one decided by relevance. You can follow people you don’t agree with, see what they post, etc. But most of us don’t bother. And this isn’t going to change anytime soon and no amount of tech whatever will change it either.
Second. Only the most privileged of people are truly able to exist within a filter bubble.
The other main part of his notion of the bubble is that it is good for ‘democracy’ and ‘responsible citizenship’ for people to be exposed to contrary view points that make them uncomfortable or challenge them.
The fact that, in his narrative, he has to describe how he used the internet, as a youth, to seek out these contrary viewpoints demonstrates, more than anything, the amount of privilege he has as a (presumably) straight, white, cis d00d.
This is a problem I often find with people who are similarly privileged.
Existing in the world as a marginalized person means that there is never a filter bubble. You don’t get protection like this.
And it doesn’t deal with the biggest culprit of filtering: the public education system. This is something particularly relevant given that it is February, Black History month. The solitary month every year where Black people get to show up in history. And we also know that every single time this month comes around, white people complain and ask why they can’t have all twelve months for white history (re: white mythology).
Then we can talk about the media in Canada. About how most of the books I read in or out of school had white men/boys as protagonists. Or how most TV shows, movies, etc. and so on likewise not only have white men/boys as protagonists, but also very much serve to emphasize this point of view as default, normal, unmarked.
I have literally spent my entire life listening to, learning about, being exposed to ideas, thoughts, worldviews that make me uncomfortable and that I do not agree with.
Instead of having to expend effort to find stuff that disagrees with me, I’m always on an eternal search for information that agrees with me. As soon as I was able to access the internet, visit the library on my own, have any amount of agency and control over the information I consumed, I have been seeking things that let me know that I am a human being. That I (and people like me) actually exist. That we live, breath, have adventures, have a history, that we have fun, that we are sad — just that we are human. That we exist.
Last, what are, precisely, the viewpoints that disagree with me or make me uncomfortable?
On the first pass, I’d say it is probably the points of view of the people who shout things like “ft” “chk” or “t**y” at me when I’m moving around and existing in public space (so happy that these people are excersing their good democratic citizenship by treating me to their challenging viewpoints in public!).
What does this mean for the internet?
Maybe it means reading sensationalized and dehumanizing stories about the death of a trans Latina, Lorena Escalera from notorious liberal/left media news rag, the New York Times.
Maybe it means reading an imperialist post when I’m just trying to learn about Ruby.
Does it mean that I should spend my time reading the content at stormwatch or Fox News?
Or maybe it could mean that the internet is one of the very few places I have any real amount of control to filter out these points of view so that I can find people who agree with me. People I can build community with. People I can rant to/with. Find support for things that most of the world refuses to support me for.
Because, at the end of the day, I do, in fact have to live in the real world. The world where (this was me yesterday at Ryerson) I have to spend 15 minutes looking for a gender neutral washroom (and another 10 waiting for it to be unoccupied) because using either gendered washroom makes me uncomfortable and feel very unsafe. The world where if I want to regularly watch TV shows with PoC, I have to watch them in languages I don’t understand. Where I get stared at all the time in public — which does nothing to help my agoraphobia. Basically the world where — almnost my entire life — I’ve felt unsafe in most public spaces.
But, hey, filter bubbles, amirite?
Geek Feminism Blog 
The point’s a good one — it’s not a general problem, but a specific one. The case of searching ‘egypt’ and seeing no mention of the revolution, just tourist advertisements for ‘visit the pyramids’ vs someone who’s done some digging into other revolutions or news, the same search will show current events is a good example of the filter bubble. Self-selected filters we can be aware of.
The problem comes when you lose the ability to find the rest of the world because you actually cannot tell it exists, when the search filters actually envelop you and you’d never discover it. It’s a problem with pervasive monitoring of what you search, the deep personalization that can be used to reinforce — or, maliciously, enforce — a worldview.
Thoughtful article and thanks for sharing. I do have a slightly different conclusion. I agree that addressing the tech aspect of the filter bubble doesn’t solve the problem. But I think it can help. Because for privileged people like me it makes it harder to do what I (finally) know I have to do, which is to seek out those different perspectives, challenge my preconceived notions, and ask what I can and should do to make this a healthier world for all.
Again, thanks.
Great observation that the typical discussion about filter bubbles is a manifestation of privilege. When Eli Pariser first started talking about it I noticed that his definition of filter bubble didn’t seem to include things like the way marginalized group’s speech tends to be, well, filtered out online (Susan Herring et. al.’s Women and Children Last is a good look at an example of this in the blogosphere). And yeah, there’s a bunch of ugly speech (transphobic, homophobic, sexist, nativist, etc.) that adds no value to my life and I do want to be able to filter out but can’t. Please let me know when I can create that kind of bubble!
And totally agreed that it’s not only a tech problem, and that the offline aspects matter as well. Still, with so many people receiving a lot of their news via Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the biases these technologies introduce (typically reflecting the biases of the people who created them and of the organizations’ major revenue sources) and the resulting distortions to the kind of information that’s available is an important topic. So, how to recast the conversation into something that explicitly includes privilege? Standpoint theory meets filter bubbles, perhaps?
Anyhow, very interesting perspective, thanks very much! (And thanks Geek Feminism for reposting!)