Awareness: Living on a data island

Oct 22, 2021 | Awareness, Daily Practice, Mindful, Mindless

You live on your own data island, or rather your individualized version of the Internet.

This may not be obvious, given the billions of sites of content and your experience; and yet it is true nonetheless; especially for any site that advertises.

Historically, search algorithms were designed to help find information; and it about 2 seconds after search was invented that someone figured out how to make money.

The good news is that anything you are looking for is also looking for you.  The reason is simple, if you find the content, you will dwell longer, and then you can be offered more advertisement.

It is a numbers game, the more advertisement you see, the more likely you are to dwell and click.

It’s capturing and selling your attention.

The dark-side to all this goodness is content bias, that is the more you click and navigate, this continuously filters and narrows future searches; and the more likely you are going to be give related content.

In short, unless you are extremely technical and with a great deal of effort, get unbiased searchers or content.  And the bias is you.

That is right, the Internet is trying to give you content that you want to read; and as a side-effect content that doesn’t agree with you will be harder to find.

Even if you consider yourself open minded and unbiased, reading across the spectrum – this impacts you too!

Think about it as distance. Content like you have read or search or clicked in the past is closer to you and everything else, anything you haven’t reenforced by a view or a click, is very far away.  Effectively out of sight.

The Awareness lesson is simple: it is easy to be fooled into believing a majorly of people think like me.

Since the Internet is always filtering your content by your past views and clicks.  And so, it is easier to believe you might be in the right and everyone else is in the wrong.

And it is easier to believe that more people, than not, agree with you.

And it is easy to derive your identity from this point of view, and overtime, to believe anyone who doesn’t agree with you must be in the minority.

Do not be fooled, this is the economics, the market of the Internet; and while it helps you and I every day; it will lead you to conclude wrong thinking and opinions.

Realize it is easy for misinformation and fake news to percolate through your Internet experience, your apps, your email, everything you are presented with.

I believe, the data-island effect greatly contributes to the toxicity of the Internet.

 

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