What the Internet is not showing us

In 2011, Eli Pariser coined a term in his book "Filter Bubble: How We Are Disempowered on the Internet" (original title: "The Filter Bubble. What The Internet Is Hiding From You.") that has become indispensable to how we imagine the internet today: Filter Bubble. Filter bubble. He describes the effects of an algorithm that was introduced two years earlier, on 4 December 2009, by Google in a post on the company blog. The aim was to be able to present search results precisely tailored to users and thus make them more accurate. Everyone should be able to find what they were looking for as before, just with a higher hit rate. In short: Google should know what we want to find before we know it ourselves. But how does Google know that in the first place? Through information that we inevitably disclose just by visiting the homepage. The IP address reveals the location from which we log in, the search history provides information about which topics are most likely to interest us, saved data from other websites tell us something about our usage behaviour. According to Google, a total of 57 such parameters were to be used to make our search easier by offering a pre-sorted – and thus limited – number of results.  

[Insert: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." (Marshall McLuhan, media theorist)] 

In the 1990s, the internet was promoted with the desire to make information flow faster, more open, more democratic. To receive news in seconds from anywhere, regardless of origin, level of education or hierarchies. That was supposed to be the future. Google's algorithm stood against this utopia. Instead of an infinite abundance of information, we were now only to see what we already know and think. Yet a democratic society is actually based on being able to take on other perspectives. By now, this system is an integral part of social networks and even news portals. In principle, this is nothing bad. If you read a particular article and are suggested a similar article, there is a good chance that you will click on it as well. It becomes dangerous when only similar articles are suggested and the impression is created that the positions presented there correspond to the majority opinion. We notice this least of all when these articles correspond to our own (political) opinion or our own interests.  

We also move in filter bubbles in analogue life. The circles of people we move in, the topics we talk about, the media we consume. We only ever experience a small part of the world we live in. The difference: we usually choose which part that is. We decide whether we read "Die Welt" or "taz". But with articles shared on Facebook, it is often not clear whose perspective is being presented. We also tend to see our own social environment as a representative image of the total population. After the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the US presidential elections in the same year, the question even arose as to what extent filter bubbles had influenced the election results, because until the very end, most people were convinced that Brexit would be prevented and Hillary Clinton would become president – because in their perception, also online, there were hardly any opposing views. 

Only by constantly reminding ourselves that what we are currently seeing, reading or hearing is just one of many aspects can we move out of our own filter bubble. Because we cannot change the fact that we are in one. However, we should not make ourselves too comfortable in it. Eli Pariser also writes: If we want to know what the world looks like, we must first understand how filters change our view of it.

Anja Bernsdorf