Essay Draft
Chloe
Gilmore
WR
122
5/15/17
Digital Life Essay
The Internet and mass media have
changed our world in infinite ways. Many people will associate the Internet’s
rise in popularity with broadening an individual’s knowledge, and mass media is
able to reach an incredibly wide audience. While these assumptions stand true
in many ways, it is less obvious the ways in which media shapes and narrows the
things we are exposed to every day. In order to begin to address this
phenomenon, there are a few terms to define, such as “filter bubble,” “nudging,”
and “choice architecture.” Filter bubbles are a way to describe how different
platforms limit and narrow the media each individual consumes on a daily basis.
“Nudging” refers to situations in which technology is used to guide consumers
to certain products and services based on past purchases and interests. Lastly,
choice architecture describes the ways that buildings are built to nudge and
guide people to certain places and ideas. Through fieldwork, articles, videos,
and class discussions, it has become clear that filter bubbles, nudging, and
choice architecture heavily influence our society in positive and negative
ways.
Filter bubbles have many subtle
effects on individual lives. Pariser’s TED Talk about Filter Bubbles discusses
the ways that these personalized bubbles depend completely on things like a
person’s past searches, locations, friends, and social media accounts. While
doing my fieldwork on this subject, I began by using Google to search general
terms such as “mental health awareness month” on my phone and also on my friend
Jamie’s phone. The results on her phone were about politics and minority rights
as they relate to mental health, while mine concentrated more on social media
and fundraising. Jamie is involved in many political activities on campus, and
probably searches more in that category while I do not. Google gave us each a
personalized page containing different results. Additionally, Jamie opened her
Netflix application to find that it had tracked her interest in a specific
murder case and suggested that she watch a new documentary on the subject.
Another example of this that I found in class readings was in the article entitled
They’re Watching You at Work by Don
Peck. This article explores how filtering out candidates with online surveys
and filters have changed the job market: “…the company can
continually tweak its questions, or add new variables to its model, to seek out
ever stronger correlates of success in any given job. For instance, the browser
that applicants use to take the online test turns out to matter, especially for
technical roles: some browsers are more functional than others, but it takes a
measure of savvy and initiative to download them.”[1] Filtering results like this has controversial
consequences, such as glossing over important candidates on the basis that they
did not use a certain browser. Pariser’s TED Talk follows up on this concern by
stating “We need it to
introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's
not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.”[2]
Nudging
is also an extremely effective way that companies track and promote different
products, services, and media.
Phones are, in many
ways, a marketing device. People don't realize it, but there's so much in the
phone that can be used by marketers, even to the point of knowing where you are
in a mall based upon the accelerometer, what level you're on. OK?
In
contrast to many of the negative effects of filter bubbles and nudging, choice
architecture can provide for affordances, which are useful to a wide audience.
My fieldwork on the Lane campus, and more specifically the Student Building,
shows this.
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