After mixing up the date for Eli Parisier’s lecture on the filter bubble at LSE today, (lesson: never trust your deskmate’s diary organisation over your own) I decided to check out the TED talk he did.
It was well worth the standing ovation.
So, why are we so keen to filter?
I totally agree with Parisier that the filter bubble could be a dangerous thing as it stops a person growing beyond their current interests and gives them a very lopsided view of the world. But it’s interesting why, after praising the vast expanses of information on the net, we are now looking to shrink it back down to the known. Personalised search, google plus one, Foursquare tips, Facebook places… Why are we so keen to filter?
Dunbar’s law that a person can only have approximately 150 meaningful connections is well quoted and much debated in the world of social marketing. This view must be right surely, as it’s backed by The Times. They say that the human brain can’t cope with the constant flow of information we are throwing at it and that constantly exposing ourselves to changing information could actually be damaging our brains and preventing us from experiencing deeper human emotions such as empathy, compassion and emotional stability.
Is Dunar’s number a safety switch for our minds
So by moving to create filter bubbles are we subconsciously trying to protect our minds from frazzling away to a crisp? We’ve free fallen through the digital world with it’s readily available information and multiple perspectives. And now we just want to go home and stand on firm ground where the recommendations we get could have happened in a conversation we had with our mates in the pub – digital becomes the connector to our friends opinions rather than the tool by which we widen our social circle.
Weak vs strong social ties
An interesting counter to this idea came to me when I was browsing through articles to research this post. Jacob Morgan argues that Dunbar’s number is irrelevant because it defines how many strong connections you can make. He makes the good point that the reason why people use social is to go beyond the known and quotes Morten Hansen’s Collaboration to good effect on this:
“Research shows that weak ties can prove much more helpful in networking, because they form bridges to worlds we do not walk within. Strong ties, on the other hand, tend to be worlds we already know; a good friends often knows many of the same people and things we know.”
(More on Moreton’s book here)
Very true I feel. When you are networking for business, or looking for bloggers with similar interests, you are looking to find people beyond those that you know already. So it doesn’t matter if the connections you make on Twitter or Facebook are weak ones.
But let’s go back to plus one.…
Now you are not looking for people. Instead you are looking for information.
This changes things. If I want to go to a great restaurant, I want to know that the reviews I’m trusting come from people that value food, that are adventurous in their tastes and who don’t mind paying for good food…People like me.
The filter bubble then becomes valuable to me because it ensures I see only the most relevant results and probably plays into a need for information to come from a known, trusted source. But on a more industry based level I think it represents an ideological shift away from seeing a social network as a tool to connect people and a move towards enabling people to look for information, put it into context and categorise it. Which is what the internet has been about all along… Perhaps we just got carried away by the popularity contest?
Image courtesy of nirmrodcooper
