On filter bubbles, within and without
I recently read Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble (2011), which discusses the potential for highly-personalised news feeds and search results to trap users in a "filter bubble" from which they can see only what news and results support their existing world-view. Cass Sunstein actually postulated that this might happen some time ago in Republic.com (2002), but Pariser updates the argument for ten years of advances in recommendation and personalisation technology.
By coincidence, my local university library happened to have Tim Dunlop's The New Front Page (2013) on its "new books" shelf around the same time. Dunlop's book is primarily a chronicle of his adventures in political blogging and the traditional media since the word "blog" was coined, but he does spend a little time discussing Sunstein's thesis. Dunlop points out that Sunstein's original analysis was conjectural, and that political bloggers since 2002 have, in fact, read and linked to the blogs of their political opponents.
To judge by the comments sections of opinion sites like The Drum and The Conversation, Dunlop is probably right as far as he goes: whatever the political alignment of an article, plenty of commenters of a competing alignment can always find time to criticise the article. That's not to say that the comments are necessarily insightful or constructive, or even that the commenters have actually read and understood the article: The Drum, especially, features plenty of mindless repetition of party lines and dogma. One is tempted to observe that, while Dunlop might be right about the motions, Sunstein was right about the end result.
Thinking about the news that arrives in my inbox, and some of the thoughts I've had about the computer industry in writing this blog, I wonder if politics is actually the least likely subject to end up in a filter bubble. Opposing political forces are at least aware of each other's existence, even if it's only to hold each other up as bogymen. But a computer scientist (for example) constantly surrounded by news about computers can easily forget that the computer industry is but one of numerous industries and agencies that contribute to modern society being what it is. Hence the mutual incomprehension that arises when one industry's orthodoxy conflicts with another industry's orthodoxy.
So I think there's an argument that we're as likely to build a filter bubble by ourselves as we are to have one built for us by technology. All that dogma on the The Drum is a case in point: the critics have the opportunity to engage with an article in a meaningful way, but many simply choose to re-state a party line. Even supposedly sophisticated communications theorists sometimes like to interpret the world through a one-dimensional lens, be it class or race or gender or sexuality or technology. I'm yet to meet a communications theorist offering an "industryist" analysis of the media, but many of us might be doing it in our own amateur way by being bound to the fate of the industry in which we work.
