Free will is a very
important aspect of a free society. It is what you exercise when you are in the
Polling Booth alone, choosing which candidate you shall vote for. It is what
you exercise in determining where to live, work or who to marry. It is what you
exercise in deciding which religion, political party or group you shall join.
It is what you exercise in deciding to take one choice over the other without
any impediment.
Can you still claim to
have free will when your available options of choice have been pre-determined
for you without your knowledge? When your choices of friends on social media
have been pre-selected for you? When the political ideology you hold has been
pre-enforced for you? When the product or services you will purchase has been
pre-preference for you? Welcome to the age of the Filter Bubble.
A filter bubble as Eli
Pariser would put it “is the creation of an authority around oneself that the
information you receive should confirm or be compatible with your own opinion,
belief, or wants. Any information that is contrary to you is locked out.”
In this age of technology,
a filter bubble is a form of Artificial intelligence that selectively guesses
what information an internet user would like to see. A Filer
bubble is built by website coders, who by relying on our personal information
on various internet platforms such as social media to get information on our
age, location, previous searches, sex, political ideology, past choices and
preferences, news we read, event we follow etc. to create a logarithm that
filter which information we should receive and what should be locked out. This
logarithm becomes the “authority”. The authority pre-decides for you (without
your knowledge) what information you should access based on your personal
information they have collected. Therefore,
when using the internet you end up only having access to information that
confirms or is similar to your own personal opinion and contrary opinion is
locked out.
The challenge is; it is
not you who decides how this “authority” exercises this authority on choosing what
to lock out and what to accept in. This is dangerous because first you
essentially lose your freewill; you surrender your power to decide which information
you get when using the internet to this authority. Secondly, you end up being
locked in your own opinion and beliefs without getting another perspective of
the issues. Your perspective is left unchallenged since contrary opinion is
locked out by this “authority”. This leads to biases or a form of
intellectual isolation. Further, you are denied the opportunity to know what
information was locked out by this “authority”.
Consider it this way, Choices and action stem from thoughts. Thoughts are dependent on the information a person is supplied with. Thus, if a person is supplied with given information, their thoughts, and subsequently their choices are influenced. No one is immune from the information received from social media, news and what we read, this factors distorts our understanding and hampers our ability to balance decisions, therefore influencing our choices.
For instance, a logarithm on
social media determines which friend suggestions you receive based on your contact
list, schools you went, political party you are in, age, locality etc.
Therefore you end up being surrounded by people who think or hold the same
opinion or belief like you and locks out anyone with a contrary opinion. You
therefore live in an illusion that your perspective is correct since everyone
holds the same opinion and your internet search confirms the same to be true.
Yet, in reality you are in a bubble that only allows information compatible
with your perspective to get in.
A Filter bubble is
important in this age of information where “censorship works by flooding people
with irrelevant information and therefore we are unable to know what to pay
attention to and what to ignore and we end up spending most of our time
investigating and debating on the authenticity of the information rather than
the content of the information. In ancient times power was to have access to
data but in current age power is to know what to ignore.” And due to this need to
know what to ignore, filter bubble comes to play this noble role.
In this age of technology
our personal information on our activities and choices are out there somewhere
being processed and shall be used to influence us to buy or use a given product
or service or vote for a particular candidate.
In as much as the filter bubble comes to play
this crucial role of limiting the flooding of information to people, we pay it
with the high cost of our own free will. Initially internet and social media
provided an avenue to get diverse view points, perspective, ideas and opinions
leading to a diverse pool of information in decision making but with the
creation of the filter bubble logarithms in search engines, social media and
other areas; internet is now an area to reinforce our biases.
As Bill Gates would put
it, that technology “lets you go off
with like-minded people, so you’re not mixing and sharing and understanding
other points of view … It’s super important. It’s turned out to be more of a
problem than I, or many others, would have expected.”
In democratic society,
democracy works because citizens are able to get views beyond their narrow
self-interest and there is a healthy exchange of information but with coming of
the filter bubble citizens only receive political information that is similar
to theirs and denying them the opinion to hear the contrary opinion of other members
in the society.
So as Filter Bubble
logarithm continue to take grip of our flow of information, maybe freewill will
just be an illusion, and our choices will be predetermined by other parties
other than ourselves. This will call upon each person to take initiative to seek
contrary opinion of others. It will require legal reform to ensure website
coders are ethical in creating these logarithms or else Free will is dead. We need
to continuously ask: What obligations does every technology innovation and
company have in exchange to the power they have due to the personal information
they hold? With every technological advancement, this question needs to be
answered.
