Filter Bubbles | Eli Pariser

 Eli Pariser is an author and public speaker. He gave a TED talk in 2011 regarding the tight control that tech giants have over contemporary media. Prior to the talk, Pariser carried out an experiment, in which he asked each of his friends to look up the term 'Egypt' on Google. While his friend Scott was presented with multitude of headlines regarding a recent protest, the focus of Daniel's search results was primarily on travel and vacation in the country.

Pariser talks about how, in archaic "Broadcast Society", gatekeepers and editors controlled the flow of information; news would be carefully curated in order to present the public with a certain point of view of the world. He the goes on to undermine the popular belief that, with the establishment on the internet, said flow of information has been liberated. Rather, he argues that the internet has been more of a means of "passing the torch" from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones.

Pariser's experiment illustrates the idea of what he terms 'filter bubbles'. A filter bubble is the cumulative effect of the algorithms that curate what information an audience is presented with, and what they are left without. The problem with filter bubbles is that we cannot see what gets edited out - they create echo chambers in which individuals are indulged with information that they like to hear: information which will keep them on whatever platform they are on. Pariser emphasises the importance of challenging points of view; if all the information we consume from the media simply reaffirms our own beliefs, we become unable to empathise with those who hold different beliefs - echo chambers will always lead to intolerance and inflated disparity within a society where each individual's echo chamber is based on their own unique filter bubble.

Researchers at Netflix noticed a trend in the way audiences watched movies and shows - people tended to watch more of the casual action or romance films in their queue before consuming more intellectually stimulating products such as documentaries, even if the documentaries had been waiting in their queue for longer. Pariser uses the examples of Favreau's Iron Man and Davis Guggenheim's 2010 documentary film Waiting for 'Superman', which is in essence a feature-length criticism of the American public education system. He describes a struggle between out "future aspirational selves" and our "impulsive present selves", stating that the best algorithms should present us with a balance of both "information vegetables" and "information desserts", as he puts is. The problem with modern algorithmic filters however, is that they always prioritise what we are likely to click on over what we are likely to learn more from. He once again employs a culinary analogy, proclaiming that we are left at the end of it all, surrounded by what he dubs "information junk food". Pariser quotes Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google: "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them".

The problem that arises from the algorithmic filter of news and media, according to Pariser, is that algorithms do not yet have the 'embedded ethics' that the human editors of broadcast society did. However, times have changed since 2011, and the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence in recent years has rendered this idea of the integration of embedded ethics in algorithmic filtering a plausible idea.

Source Library

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bt26wLYmL8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22

BIG ISSUE PROJECT

 OVERVIEW

Tasked with making a cover for the Big Issue magazine, my main focus was creating something which would stand out on the street, where the Big Issue is exclusively sold by vendors.

I used the 2022 film Weird: The Al Yankovic Story as the focus of this issue as it lends itself to a host of intertextual references, as well as the fact it received a recent surge of relevance due to winning an Emmy award.

THE BOY WHO LIVED - reference to Daniel Radcliffe's famous role in the Harry Potter film series, based off J K Rowling's book series of the same name.

ANOTHER ONE RIDES THE BUS - reference to Weird Al's 1983 hit, Another One Rides the Bus, a parody of the Queen song Another One Bites the Dust. It also serves as a segue into the other story advertise on the cover of the issue, that being the new, fully electric bus routes in York.

REFLECTION

I learned a lot from this task, as it was my first proper project involving Photoshop, which can be very difficult/frustrating to use at times. My frustration at the project stems mainly from Photoshop's UI - without somebody there to tell you where everything is, it can quickly become overwhelming (especially compared to easier-to-use, if somewhat limited alternatives such as Canva).

Improvements I would make to this project include:

• Changing the lighting on Weird Al - the bright lights reflecting off of him to not match with the background I selected for the cover of this issue.
• Finding a way to make the text POP more - The red on red at the top doesn't particularly stand out. Nor does the red text overlaying Weird Al. Brighter/contrasting colours are needed to make the features of the issue stand out. This is paramount for The Big Issue, as it is sold on the street by vendors; it needs to be eye-catching.
• Selecting a different image of Weird Al altogether might have been wise - in this one, his body is obscured by a massive accordion, and the colours are somewhat muted/dull; also the fault of the accordion, which blocks Al's bright shirt.
• Figuring out how to properly crop a character out of a scene. I made several errors when experimenting with this, resulting in the thin transparent portion which cuts across Weird Al's hair.