The bubble and Homophily

Isaac Ramnaraign
Blog post #3
The bubble

Apart from what Clive Thompson stated about diversity in search engines, Eli Pariser had a more compelling argument about the phenomenon known as the bubble. The bubble applies to the concept of two different people searching the same topic on google, and having different results. Pariser was talking about how the platforms uses our history, and our browser to make the results better in our favor. However, is this really a good thing? What if I do research on India and end up finding out more on Bollywood movies and cinema, rather than the poverty and human trafficking that occurs every year, just because results show more of the good side rather than the bad side of India?
This is what Pariser meant by the bubble. The bubble relates to containing information to match our Queue rather than showing a widespread of results that are related to the topic as well. If I spend more time researching foods than politics and I end up googling Japan, I will most likely have a few search related pages on japanese food rather than the politics that is ongoing over there.
Clive Thompson talks that this diversity may be a good thing. Although he did mention that it is bad because it keeps the truth from us, he said that this makes us more diverse because if our results show up the same, everything we search will be the same. Our interests, topics all would be less diverse because the search engine lacked our interests. Just like using youtube and having a recommendations bar. If I like listening to Pop rock music, the recommendation bars will have music similar to my taste and that makes me different. If these platforms did not use our history for recommendations, we will not be able to explore more into our interests, rather we will most likely see what everyone else is seeing and that can cause many artists to lose content, or to be recognized. At the end of the day, we are people who strive but lack the ambition to do more. Social media is just media, and these are just words behind a computer. In order to make a difference, we need not to only spread awareness to the topic but to actually take physical action towards it. Our actions speak louder than words and so far the only news being broadcasts are of those who use action more than a few words on a website.