Living in the era of the Filter Bubble
One definition of living in a bubble is that you never leave your comfort zone. Getting out of your particular bubble is uncomfortable and explains why people recreate the bubbles they are familiar with time and time again, whether it’s in jobs or relationships.
Interacting with the world via the internet increasingly creates an online bubble that means you only see news and other content in line with your own views and outlook. Coined by author Eli Pariser, and cited in a recent article in the Guardian, the Filter Bubble is an unintended consequence of personalised search.
It means you see advertisements from companies or their competitors whose websites you have visited, and for products and services you have searched for in the past. You’re shown the news you’ve demonstrated an interest in previously and even see social media posts that fit in with your general point of view.
From a public relations and marketing point of view, it means that news stories and the messages within them are reaching a more targeted audience than ever before. But what’s the impact on our vision of the world? Is it just too easy to live within the Filter Bubble and never look outside to see what other people are thinking and saying?
Of course consumers of news have always gravitated towards the social groups and publications that reflect their own views back at them. Everyone remembers the exercise at school when you compared and contrasted how different newspapers reported the same story in very different ways.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the run-up to the recent EU Referendum. A Today Programme presenter opined that you could be living in two different countries depending on the paper you were reading, so polarised was coverage in the business-focused FT and the Brexit-led Daily Mail.
The Filter Bubble is unlikely to drift away any time soon and indeed personalisation in communications will only intensify. Could a return to reading multiple physical publications, which don’t leave a paper trail and offer a wide range of views and information, be on the cards?
Written by Judith Massey, Executive Director
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