One way to understand it is to think of an ordinary bookstore: there we know that there are thousands of titles, but the first ones we look at – and often the only ones we look at – are the ones on the news table. Even when we leave those tables and look at the other tables available from other categories, we will not be seeing everything, we will not even be seeing everything that the category of that table could be showing: we will be seeing what the bookseller chose to put on the tables, what he put on “display”.
The algorithms are what order the tables of the books. They learned so much from user interactions that they anticipate and ask us to watch the next video or notification from the ex-girlfriend.
In this way, the world of the internet, and above all, social networks, give us the false feeling that we can choose a piece of news or content from among the infinities available when, in reality, we are almost condemned to choose among very few that already exist. They were curated to maximize our satisfaction.
As a professional magician, I see this as the perfect magician’s trap. The good trap in magic is not the one that is hidden, in which the spectator feels that he missed seeing something, but rather the trap that can be seen through, the trap that was all along in plain view – like Edgar Allan Poe’s Letter-but you don’t notice. It is the false illusion of freedom of choice.
Added to this is the concept of confirmation bias. yes naturally one tends to read the things in which one agrees, with the algorithms choosing what to show us, this is reinforced to the maximum. Now, by definition, they are going to show us only what interests us or what we believe in, so that we will continue to consume and ratify our opinion but, for worse – as far as critical gaze is concerned – with the false feeling that we do not it is like this, that we are seeing everything because on the internet ‘everything is there’.
In this context, we can understand that the permanent improvements presented by social networks have a clear and explicit commercial objective: advertising. What that great advertising agency that is Google sells (Facebook, and Instagram, etc.), is the ability to advertise the product to be offered to the public that wants to buy it. To that end they refine their algorithms.
Ultimately, it is about understanding that this Babel Library does not lack librarians.
CEO of Snoop Consulting.
Source: Ambito
