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"People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles"" I'm not as convinced they are being funneled. I remember back in high school, my friends and I would sit

"People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles"" I'm not as convinced they are being funneled. I remember back in high school, my friends and I would sit around in a circle, in meat space. "War is wrong" And we would go around the circle: "yup", "absolutely", etc "Some other liberal talking point" yup, of course, so true.... I feel they are self selecting. Look at the election, when liberals were 3x more likely to unfriend people. [1] And I think they have been self selecting since before the internet. Also there is a geographic component. Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue. We have had geographic filter bubbles for decades. 1. http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/

jeff_petersen 10y ago
> Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue. Don't let the electoral map fool you, there are very few places that skew overwhelmingly to one side. Many places may have a majority favoring one major political party, but the minority isn't that small. I live in the northeast, which is reliable electoral votes for democrats but there's not shortage of republicans around.
freeflight 10y ago
Keep in mind that in the meat space people consciously chose to socialize with alike people, that's why you called them "friends" and why only "liberal talking points" were discussed. On social media, this happens on a less conscious level because with every choice you make some algorithm slowly "personalizes" everything you get to see a little bit more, thus it increases surfacing things/people that you are more likely to agree with while pretty much "hiding" anything/anybody that you wouldn't like/agree with. This is a slow process and it's mostly hidden from the user, as such most people are not even aware of being funneled in different "circles" in such a way, so they think their personalized social media reality represents the reality of everybody as a whole. The big difference to geographic filter bubbles being that those still leave you aware of there being an "other side to the story", case in point: You know there are red states and there are blue states. On social media that other side gets blended out in such a way that it might just as well not exist at all because it won't be surfaced to you unless you make a conscious effort looking for it.
- ahartman00 10y ago
  "Keep in mind that in the meat space people consciously chose to socialize with alike people" "some algorithm slowly "personalizes" everything you get to see a little bit more" You're right, I wish I would have wrote: they are not exclusively being funneled. That being said, they are still friending alike people, and not liking stuff which is diverse. I realize I am sort of victim blaming here :( Basically I have seen a lot of: "the internet causes x", where x existed before. I just wanted to make the point that this is an evolution of a previous phenomenon.
  - freeflight 10y ago
    Not blaming the Internet here, rather social media. Pre-social media this didn't really exist in such a crass way. 20 years ago it was kind of a novel thing to "meet" another human online. Most people didn't really care about the other person's political beliefs or whatnot, it was already enough to have found somebody else who was also on this weird Internet thing and shared the enthusiasm for it. I remember thinking back then: This is the thing! This is what's gonna unite humanity across all kinds of borders as people can't be discriminated against based on superficial attributes like age, skin color or political beliefs. After all, back then we didn't have "social media profiles" and most people still cared about their privacy so barely anybody blast out their personal details for the whole world to see, sadly that didn't become a reality. Instead, it feels like we are in the exact opposite place, what a sad turn of events.
SticksAndBreaks 10y ago
The only thing that has changed is the ability to demand opinion segragation and discussion protection, without beeing called out as undemocratic hyper-critter.

jeff_petersen 10y ago

> Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue. Don't let the electoral map fool you, there are very few places that skew overwhelmingly to one side. Many places may have a majority favoring one major political party, but the minority isn't that small. I live in the northeast, which is reliable electoral votes for democrats but there's not shortage of republicans around.

freeflight 10y ago

Keep in mind that in the meat space people consciously chose to socialize with alike people, that's why you called them "friends" and why only "liberal talking points" were discussed. On social media, this happens on a less conscious level because with every choice you make some algorithm slowly "personalizes" everything you get to see a little bit more, thus it increases surfacing things/people that you are more likely to agree with while pretty much "hiding" anything/anybody that you wouldn't like/agree with. This is a slow process and it's mostly hidden from the user, as such most people are not even aware of being funneled in different "circles" in such a way, so they think their personalized social media reality represents the reality of everybody as a whole. The big difference to geographic filter bubbles being that those still leave you aware of there being an "other side to the story", case in point: You know there are red states and there are blue states. On social media that other side gets blended out in such a way that it might just as well not exist at all because it won't be surfaced to you unless you make a conscious effort looking for it.

ahartman00 10y ago
"Keep in mind that in the meat space people consciously chose to socialize with alike people" "some algorithm slowly "personalizes" everything you get to see a little bit more" You're right, I wish I would have wrote: they are not exclusively being funneled. That being said, they are still friending alike people, and not liking stuff which is diverse. I realize I am sort of victim blaming here :( Basically I have seen a lot of: "the internet causes x", where x existed before. I just wanted to make the point that this is an evolution of a previous phenomenon.
- freeflight 10y ago
  Not blaming the Internet here, rather social media. Pre-social media this didn't really exist in such a crass way. 20 years ago it was kind of a novel thing to "meet" another human online. Most people didn't really care about the other person's political beliefs or whatnot, it was already enough to have found somebody else who was also on this weird Internet thing and shared the enthusiasm for it. I remember thinking back then: This is the thing! This is what's gonna unite humanity across all kinds of borders as people can't be discriminated against based on superficial attributes like age, skin color or political beliefs. After all, back then we didn't have "social media profiles" and most people still cared about their privacy so barely anybody blast out their personal details for the whole world to see, sadly that didn't become a reality. Instead, it feels like we are in the exact opposite place, what a sad turn of events.

SticksAndBreaks 10y ago

The only thing that has changed is the ability to demand opinion segragation and discussion protection, without beeing called out as undemocratic hyper-critter.