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You don’t have to wander outside your online circles to know that the rhetoric of the “bubble” has engulfed coverage of post-2016 politics almost as thoroughly as these online “echo chambers” were said to have sequestered its captives. It is no surprise, then, that The Tech Industry(tm) has pitched in ways to burst, to reveal, or to design our way out of such bubbles. As one WIRED article published 11 days after the 2016 election put it,
“Technologists are trying to use software to burst those same [filter] bubbles. Since Donald Trump’s victory, a handful of engineers have turned to code in hopes of turning the United States purple. They’ve built apps, extensions, and sites that aim to unite Americans’ separate realities (Dreyfuss, “Coders Think” WIRED.”
It is not unusual or unexpected that Technology emerges as a pharmakon — a cure and a poison, an illness and its cause, a remedy and a facade — for various social problems. The idea of turning technology back upon “itself” to design our ways out of the problems we have seemed to design our ways into emerges as a potential redemption narrative in the post-2016 political world. While such redemption narratives around technology are hardly new to the 21st century, they are worth highlighting in the context of knowledge facilitation and aims to unite “separate realities” because each of these narratives reveals different assumptions about “what is knowledge?” “what is a reality?” and “what does it mean to ‘unite’ points of view in practice?” As I wrote on one of my first posts on this blog, what we call “filter bubbles” is not one “thing.” It is no surprise that efforts to combat what can be misdescribed as a singular “problem” take dissimilar strategies to work against it. As there is no solid definition of filter bubble — a fact that does not preclude the possibility of limited, but useful working definitions — each of these “solutions” define this “problem” in different ways.
Instead of “ranking” different “apps, extensions, and sites” that attempt to “burst” our information bubbles in ways that go beyond simply uniting “Americans’ separate realities,” it is worth examining each of these extensions on their own level. How do they work? What makes any one tool unique from any other? What problem are the creators trying to solve? How well do they accomplish it? And, to go back to technology as pharmakon, what assumptions are being made about epistemology (study of knowledge, or study of how we know what we know) and ontology (study of being; existence and nonexistence, what it “means” to “exist)? How do these seemingly theoretical abstractions play into the design and use of these apps, extensions, and digital tools in material ways?
To this end, I am starting a 6 part “series” called “Break On Through” consisting of 5 entries on a particular “bubble bursting tool” and a conclusion. Each of the five entries consists of:
- Background: Who created the app? For what purpose?
- Overview: A walk through of how the tool works. This section will be slightly more detailed than a tutorial, as it aims to explain the operation to people who may not want to ever use it.
- “Review:” Finally, the piece ends by evaluating how well the object accomplishes its intended purpose, and speculates other potential uses. Most importantly, it plums the theoretical implications of how knowledge, ethics, and technical design interlock in the project and influence how it is created and used.
- If necessary, the post may include descriptions of design and usability.
These upcoming (non-consecutive) queued entries go at technical ways meant to break into the island in our hearts and the country in our eyes in our current state of predominately (though not exclusively) U.S. Politics.
Keep a look out for the first entry this weekend.
Works Cited:
Dreyfuss, Emily. “Coders Think They Can Burst Your Filter Bubble With Tech.” WIRED, Published: November 19, 2016. Accessed: January 13, 2019. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/coders-think-can-burst-filter-bubble-tech/
FLUTUANTE. “Pharmakon: Cure or the Poison?” Float, crash, be fluid, WordPress. Accessed: January 25, 2019. https://flutuante.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/pharmakon-the-cure-or-the-poison/
Read More:
Recommended Toolkit: “Internet Privacy: Filter Bubbles and the Deep Web: How to Burst Your Filter Bubble!” The University Library of University of Illinois-Urbana Campaign, University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign, http://guides.library.illinois.edu/c.php?g=348478&p=2347795
Piore, Adam . “Technologists are Trying to Fix the ‘Filter Bubble’ Problem They Helped Create.” The MIT Technology Review, August 22, 2018. Accessed: December 2018. Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611826/technologists-are-trying-to-fix-the-filter-bubble-problem-that-tech-helped-create/
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