Internet Is Hiding - The Filter Bubble

As I believe we are no longer exposed to the whole world through the internet. The Internet has limited us to what we know or what we want. This trend has begun few years back. We call this strategy Filter bubbles. All most all leading search engines and social networking sites are assuming what detail we want by examining our web browser history and the key words that we typed. Next time we are trying to search through the internet, the search result has been changed according to the history. In short, they personalized the search result.
Particularly, in social networking sites, we only see the friends and their friends who have the same interests or the same ideology about certain things such as music we like, artists we like, and the religion we belong to. As a result, we all confine to certain ethnic group of one segment of the society.

However, there is positive outcome with this discovery. Even in the real word, we prefer to deal with the people who have the same likings, since we have many things to discuss about them. We often express this phenomenon as "Birds of a feather flock together”. We all have experienced this. For example, In online chat rooms, we are looking for like-minded peers. Clive Thompson called this scenario “ High-Bandwidth Buddies” (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/st_thompson_homophily).  Clive Thompson has identified this phenomenon as Homophily.
On the other hand, we can save lot of time without browsing unrelated or unnecessary people from our search results. When we come to the online shopping, this Filter bubbles help to narrow down what we exactly want and the closest location we can reach.

Personally, I preferred this Filter bubbles idea in regard to the social Networking sites, but not with Google. I have met many people who like art and people who work in related fields through the Facebook.

Search Result (Before Filter bubble )                        Search Result (After Filter bubble )

 

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

Obama Campaign With New Media

A senator, represented the state of Illinois from January 2005 to November 2008, became the leader of the whole world. How he did that?  His presidency campaign was unique and unrivaled to any other precedent candidate in many different approaches. Primarily, the matured online social networking technology was the front line tool for his precedence campaign. 

In The Obama campaign 2008; his advertising team (Blue State Digital) has used diversified online channels and technologies to reach the people. For example, in his web site there was interactive element called “MyBO”, which allows other people to upload there Email address books to the site and let the community to join with Obama campaign. In addition, the advertising group put all the secondary channels together, such as text messages (SMS), Phone calls, online videos of his speeches and music videos, mass email complains to raise the awareness about donation, blogs, and forums.

Barack Obama in Springfield, IL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CjjqnvRKCo

Barack Obama: Yes We Can

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe751kMBwms

Furthermore, Facebook, MySpace, were the main stream social networks that Blue State Digital worked on. Here you can see the growth rate of usage of the corresponding sites during the campaign period.

 Technology review September /October 2008

Risk and Benefits of Social Networking

In the first place, I consider t Social Networking site as a contemporary social issue. In our generation we have grown up with the physical environment. A little wooden doll made us happy and smile. We had many activities and games with peers. I remember how i spent my childhood which was playful and eventful. After school, I played cricket until its get dark with same age colleagues.  In short, i remember how I become matured person without the internet or any other device that has a capability to access the social networking sites.

On the contrary, today’s children have to familiar with the internet otherwise they stay behind the classroom. Because of the research based assignments, children have to visits many websites and find newest and unique information in order to make their assignments better. This is a severe expose to many kind of bad influences and threats. The “cyberbullying” is one of the threats that kids get victimized through social Networks. The children tend to follow or imitate the other people who they talk to and what they see from other people posts (Videos, Images) thought the social networking sites. For example, by watching unstandardized video about staying thin, children follow bad eating disorders. Depressed kids can post a video or images about the best ways to commit suicide, which will lead to another innocent child to experiment that when he/she is in a bad mode.

Moreover, since there are many unethical activities are taking place online, any computer can get exposed to viruses, adware or malware that associate with porn site and identity theft via email or social networks such as Facebook, Twitter. As a result, kids might get change to see what they shouldn’t see at his/her age.

As I believe, parents have no much of option to rescue their son or daughter from this social menace, because cyber social interaction has a part of the modern life. And also, they cannot restrict from them, since the social networking site are accessible from many communication device now a days. 

However, I see one good side of online social networking, which can help introverted children to learn how to socialize without physically appearing in front of others. This will lead them to initiation human connection before they meet.