The Filter Bubble
The internet is dead. Welcome, instead, to your internet...the online experience created solely for you.
Personalisation is the current vogue amongst Internet giants such as Facebook and Google, with each plowing vast sums into creating systems that will generate web pages uniquely customised to individual users. Ultimately, they want to figure out who you are, what you want, and then give it to you. This is the Filter Bubble.
Sounds great, doesn't it? Yet in his forthcoming new book, Eli Pariser warns that, as a consequence, 'the Internet is showing us what we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see'. Invisible, algorithmic editing of the web means we may not be exposed to information that can challenge or broaden our worldview, because, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg put it, 'A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.'
Such words should wake us to the fact that - without great wisdom and ethical commitment in regard to our use of it - the Internet, rather than providing the promised window out on the world, may come to be a mirror for gazing ever more intensely at ourselves. A technology that, unbeknown to us, entrenches us far deeper in the illusion that we live in a world created for one is positively dangerous.
Realistically, of course, the Filter Bubble may not be anything new. Each of us erect Filter Bubbles around us all our lives, and are adept at insulating ourselves from the things that have the capacity to trouble or disturb us. By automating this process, perhaps the internet simply saves us time and energy.
Yet, as disciples of the crucified Christ, we intuitively know that Filter Bubbles - erected either by ourselves or others - are illusions we cannot afford. We must necessarily acknowledge that, what I perceive to be relevant or important does not necessarily reflect what is most relevant or important. Bursting the Bubble, allowing the world as it is to press in on us, will prove a far from easy or painless business, for it means denying ourselves the choice of deciding how much of the world, its problems and its brokenness, as well as its joys and aspirations, we are exposed to.
Bursting the Bubble means recognising our vulnerability and fragile capacity to cope. Despite this, in so doing, we choose to regard the world as Christ did and does; not with anxiety and despair, but with liberation and salvation in mind.
Ben Care
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