Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Is Social Media Controlling Our Lives?
Facebook has subliminal control of your thoughts and interests, how so
you ask? Well, believe it or not, if you have yet to realize, Facebook
decides which of your friends updates you can see, the number of updates
and also how often. Google sends you news based on your searches and
surfs of the web. Eli Pariser shares his prime example of his
"Conservative" and "Liberal" friends, where he'd click on more of his
liberal friends posts and updates and in doing so on Facebook, he was
ridden of his conservative friends posts as if they were non-existent on
his Facebook. Facebook and Google has their hands up our backs, but if
we take action and stop it at the source, Pariser says we can nip it in
the bud. Clive Thompson on the other hand, a fellow internet writer
states, that we are becoming boring human beings, with no sense of
creativity or imagination. Why? Because of the bubble we live in, or
should i say filter bubble. He feels we are missing out on a variety of
vital info largely due to the fact that what we surf on the web is
filtered to our "liking" , but to the extent where we only see hat and
not anything else. So is the internet really expanding our minds? Or is
it constricting it and limiting the expansion of what we learn and
analyze on the web.
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It's a scary thing when you're unconsciously being shaped by a force that neither has the authority or consent to do so. Despite its intentions, it doesn't always work in the right way. With Facebook, I used to wonder why I would constantly see certain people and their posts that I wasn't interested in seeing, and have the people I was interested in filtered out somehow. I think rather than streamline a person's newsfeed so algorithmically, Facebook should give people more customization upfront, rather than leaving it as an option in the settings. At least this way, we'd be seeing what we want to see and not what some program thinks we want.
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