The filter Bubble Chapter 5: The Public is Irrelevant

1. The filter BubbleChapter 5: The Public is Irrelevant Shelby Daeffler and Haylee Riding

2. “What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.” The internet still makes it possible for government to manipulate the truth. “Rather than decentralizing power, as its early proponents predicted, in some ways the Internet is concentrating it.”

3. Lords of the Cloud The cloud is an enormous pool of computing power and storage, network machines create. Pros about the cloud Cons about the cloud • It allows clients much greater flexibility. • Businesses that run the cloud, don’t have to buy more hardware when processing demands expand: They just rent a greater portion of the cloud. • Government can more easily search your information on home computers. If you use Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail, you “lose your constitutional protections immediately.”

4. Friendly World Syndrome • Starsky and Hutch • Kids who saw a lot of TV violence were much more likely to be worried about real-world violence. • Now easier to get the kind of news you want to get via blogs, etc. • Important issues/events completely surpassed- the most liked, and therefore, the most seen posts/threads/etc. are the most likeable • It’s not just the issues that disappear- it’s the whole political process. • Oceana’s ad taken down (“Help us protect the world’s ocean. Join the fight!”)- “language advocating against the cruise line industry”

5. The Invisible Campaign • Filter Bubble Politics can make us into single issue voters. • They can find one issue we like and use that issue to campaign, making us persuaded to vote for that candidate, while we ignoring all of the other issues. • Companies are allowing users to remove advertisements that they don’t like. • If they blocked out a certain advertisement for one of the candidates it will block out all of the other advertisements for that candidate, which will kill this candidates online advertising campaign. • Filter bubbles also make it harder to have a public argument. • Campaigns cannot know what their opponent is saying if ads are only targeted to a certain group of people. • Companies like Google may not have the resources or interest to make sure that all ads are truthful, that will run in election cycles to come.

6. Fragmentation • Personalized outreach gives better bang for the political buck. • Vehicles for expressing identity- needed to speak more intimately to different groups of people with divergent identities they wanted to express • Product wanted by different groups of consumers for different reasons- began to split- what is true? What can be expected of this product/candidate/etc.? • Cause and effect- due to desire to maximize self-expression

7. Discourse and Democracy • In a post-material world where your highest task is to express yourself, the public infrastructure that supports it falls out of place. • Quantum mathematician David Bohm: “To communicate literally means to make something common.” • Town meeting- anyone could be heard; gave a sense of the kind of people that make up the community • Sometimes involves sharing piece of information, more often means group coming together to create a new, common meaning (dialogue) • Allows look at the whole • The filter bubble creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists.