Hi everyone!
As you all know we were assigned to read, Contemporary Technological Discourse, pages 29-42 by Eran Fisher for this week. While reading through this chapter, I recognized that Fisher's argument spoke much about how social concerns and power relations are addressed by digital discourse being known in public discourse in current times. Fisher demonstrated this by referring to Wired Magazine as a prime example. As stated by Louis Rossetto, a founder of Wired Magazine,
"...digital citizens are reinvigorating democratic discourse and reinventing civil society...We at Wired remain obsessed with authoritatively reporting on the new economy, new media, crucial technologies, and the digital nation. With providing context for a community overwhelmed by data," (Fisher 36).
With this in mind, do you believe that today's web companies tailor their precise, calculated services to our personal interests too much? Therefore do the major news and search engines under-expose us to competing view points of our own? It is a concern that often we must go out of our way to get information that is typically not suited for us. This Ted Talk by Eli Pariser demonstrates how we may want to reconsider if what we find in our search results as coming from an unbiased nature or not.
I agree that this is an issue. Essentially, we use in internet to explore information that we are not already familiar with. Students use Google to do research on information they are gradually learning about. It seems like a waste to make something as connective as the internet entirely tailored to ourselves. It should be used to exploration and connection. I appreciate the term internet junk food. We are constantly being bombarded with information and advertising that we are not interested in, however, based on our location, race, age, we are being fed certain media that is believed to be suitable to us. Here is a quick clip by Joel Stein that briefly explains how advertisers obtain information about us, and how inaccurate this information can be.
ReplyDeletehttp://content.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,821500876001_2058396,00.html
I think this is a really interesting perspective! Being underexposed to competing viewpoints seems like one of those things that you're mildly aware of but it isn't until its put into words in front of you that you realize why that might be an issue.
ReplyDeleteYou may feel like you're very well versed in a specific political viewpoint, but if you are only ever hearing why that viewpoint is good, you would never be able to defend it against arguments coming from another political point of view.
Another example is religion: a google search of "most heated comment thread ever" turned up results from reddit's atheism forums. The arguments on here are all based in personal opinion, likely strengthened by evidence they found online that was tailored to their beliefs.
Check it out if you have the chance www.reddit.com/r/atheism
I agree with Nicole… this is a very interesting perspective! I have actually noticed within my own Internet use that Google and Facebook tailor their results to my past search history. Many of us have too many Facebook friends to be able to see all their activity on our news feed, but I have noticed in the past that only the people’s pages that I regularly check, or people’s posts that I often like, continue to appear on my newsfeed. Half the people I have on Facebook I can’t even stay up to date with! Unless I remember to check their personal page manually, I don’t see any of their activity on my feed. YouTube also uses this strategy. After I watch a video, there are recommendations all over the site for other videos I may enjoy that relate to the one I just watched. I agree that this technique on sites makes it very difficult for us to see other opinions and perspectives, since we typically wouldn’t search for them ourselves.
ReplyDeleteAs we all have noticed I’m sure, many social media sites also display ads that are usually related to a site we may have visited. What we see on our online news feeds is called targeted advertising. I have noticed this on Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Cookies constantly track our online activity. I have attached a link of a short video on how Internet cookies work. It would be really interesting to see how the ads we all see on social media change and possibly become more general if we were to turn off all cookie settings and compare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPQhME1UYQU