| name | value |
| date | 2025-01-18 |
| location | Miami, US |
| author | Anton |
In Californication I’ve told a story how some information and common knowledge have a huge latency(time to travel) when spreading from one cultural hotspot to rest of the world.
It always took time for ideas and cultural norms from some society or group of people to spread around geographically. So pretty much for the whole history of community we had some bubbles that would grow and pop. In cycles.
Those bubble were the size of specific group. So your worldview might differ to the people outside of your bubble but you would still find people who share the same opinion or cultural norms inside your group(same geographical location).
Of course it almost worked, but there were always some outliers inside each bubble - people who didn’t agree and looked for a new knowledge and change etc.
When the Internet came around it gave us a new promise - your new group and social bubble can be geographically distributed. UIf you are misfit you can still find your people and your community even 1000 km away. All using technology.
What a beautiful dream it was. It worked for the first ~20 years of the Internet.
Then algorithmic feeds came around. They had two new properties:
- completely personalized and unique to each user.
- unsharable and not possible to inspect - it’s impossible to see what other person saw.
So in the world of algorithmic feeds every person has their own informational and cultural bubble.
In the older days our personal opinions were mostly formed based on our life experience(and some consumed things like books and movies). But there are not so many insights one can form based on their own life. Maybe ~20-40 per a lifetime? So it was a very limited set of things on which you might hold a strong opinion - those were important things that you had visceral experience about. And you would defend those things if disagreement happens in your life - as your life depends on it.
Nowadays our tastes and opinions are mostly formed based on what we see(consume).
Modern Internet was famously called “information superhighway” - it plugs us into infinite matrix of data and media. It overwhelms our senses and bombards us with information. It makes us form opinions on many things we see per day. It can be 20-40 things daily that we need to form our opinion on. Same number as before, but now it’s per day and not per lifetime.
Every new topic has a potential for disagreement. So if you form 20 opinions per day there is a chance that you would disagree with tons of people on those 20 topics.
And most likely you would disagree with people - all because of algorithmic feeds that are unique to you - the things that you see are seen only by you in that specific order and time. This order determines what you know and how you form your opinions.
That is why we see so many disagreements online. You say something and other person disagrees. You want to scream - if only they would know(seen) things that I know(seen) they would agree with me! But that is impossible to achieve. Your feed is private. It’s not possible to send a link to your feed and allow person to consume same content you consumed from the different platforms in the order you consumed them.
This is a tragedy of personalization. We were told that our life would be better because we are unique snowflakes and software would be able to tailor things to our tastes and needs. Instead we got personalized information superhighways. Plugged straight into our psyches.
And those unique superhighways - those custom algorithmic feeds - make us more isolated from everyone. We feel that we know the truth - because we saw things in our custom feeds - but no-one agrees with us. We feel misunderstood and disconnected.
Internet started with sharing things you consumed: sharing books you’ve read, films you watched, music you listened too, sites you bookmarked etc. Everything was public. Sources for our opinions were possible to audit and trace their history. If someone expressed an opinion you would see how that person came to that opinion by seeing his online history. Nowadays nothing is traceable. Most of the content is ephemeral anyway - some tiktok video that will be gone, some small tweet that is hard to find, some snap video or instagram story that will disappear soon.
Things are not permanent anymore. And they are not communal. We were promised to have an ability to surf the web. Navigate all the information and media in unique ways. But I think the original dream was to surf alongside other people, Seeing them surf the web too. What we got is us surfing (or even us being made to surf) completely on our own. On isolated beach which only us can access with no other people in sight.
Reflections
- memes is the one of the known to me things that still unites us. memes are usually not dividing by nature - because there are no opinions involved - and they are incredibly shareable that allows them to travel between bubbles and spread fast and far.
- what we are promised and sold is not necessary the thing we will get.
- good things do not come for free. when new solution is developed to solve some problem there might be significant side effects that would be hard to fix.