What are filter bubbles and are you stuck in one?
Information abundance, or information overload, leads to filtering. You do need filters since the amount of data is too overwhelming. However, do you know who is doing the filtering for you? It may be so that your behavior dictates what is being left out. This way you get stuck into more of the same and this may prevent you from doing new discoveries. And doing new discoveries is what the internet is for, right?
Take a little over a minute to watch this short movie about information overload and content curation to understand how individual curation limits our world view.
Filter bubbles are thorougly discussed in this great TED Talk by Eli Pariser. It’s well worth your time since not knowing what you don’t know may hurt you. Eli starts by telling how Facebook, Yahoo News and Google personalize what they show you. Different people get different search results. More sites are flirting with personalization which moves us into a world where the internet is showing us what ‘it’ thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. All of these algoritmes together create a filter bubble and you don’t decide what gets in and… you never get to see what gets edited out.
How Crowd Sourced Learning eliminates filter bubbles
In order to understand the world around us we need a place to aggregate everyone’s content and tools to pick out and organize the best information. The BuzzTalk application does this for you and doesn’t look at the preferences of just a bunch of friends or your latest click actions. Instead, BuzzTalk looks at everyone that is tweeting and sharing links. Sites that are linked to are added to the monitoring pool which now counts 45.000 sources.
We call this Crowd Sourced Learning as it’s the crowd of people that determines which sources should be considered valuable for monitoring. Crowd Sourced Learning thus eliminates the filter bubble that is limiting our world view and prevents complete business analysis from being made. BuzzTalk is continuously enriched via this phenomenon.
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