Week 3 – The Project Conception
Because my undergraduate degree is in Information Management and Information Systems, I am interested in the inequality of information. One of my ideas is that what you see may only be what you want to see, or what others want you to see.
Since Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we have been exploring what the world really is, and this search has been going on for almost a thousand years. Modern society is becoming increasingly large and complex, and people do not have the time or energy to know things beyond their own experience, but only through news agencies. But they are hampered in their efforts to provide images of the outside world by censorship, reporting rules, etc. The public is also limited by its own time, attention span and inherent biases, resulting in the images that end up in the public mind being different from the real ones. In the internet age, people are increasingly dependent on online news apps and pushing to access information about the outside world, but algorithms with financial and political interests are naturally biased and they cater to users, creating an Information Cocoon where users become increasingly absorbed in the information they like and increasingly ignorant of the uninteresting world.
We are told what the world looks like before we see it, we can imagine most things before we experience them, and unless we are educated to be acutely aware, these preconceptions can strongly influence the whole process of perception. These biases can affect our fair interpretation of the whole event, but they are the most efficient and convenient way for us humans to deal with things. Typifying someone or something is also what allows us to process it quickly, even though our practice of categorisation and labelling is not always appropriate.
The more untrained the mind, the more it likes to make the assumption that if two things attract attention at the same time, then they are causally connected. But there is not necessarily a cause and effect between two things, or we may not be able to work out who is the cause and who is the effect at all. The phenomenon of farmers applying large amounts of fertiliser, but is agriculture polluting the soil? Perhaps farmers are only the most insignificant link in the chain of the damage cycle? Perhaps they are simply dependent and subordinate to the sales market of the fertiliser industry? The government did not ban the sale of toxic chemicals very early on either. We tend to use quantitative research methods to portray and explain the world, but the process of sampling is fraught with randomness and uncertainty, while the sample we select may not be representative of the group we wish to study.
Due to differences in economic, age and educational backgrounds, the information disseminated in each person’s social circle is inherently selective and carries a distinctly ring-fenced character. The political and national issues discussed by the powerful upper classes rarely reach the lower classes, while the middle classes are exposed to relevant information but still do not have a complete grasp of the facts, while at the same time the lower classes have problems feeding themselves, so the images of the world that people from different walks of life are exposed to are clearly stratified.
In any case, the two days of intensive study allowed me to experience a meeting of minds and I will continue to think about this issue.
Bias and algorithms – a scary combination when trying to share factual information with the broad general public. I find questions you are thinking of really interesting, especially the one where different information could be provided to different classes, like each exists in their own little “For You Page” bubble. I see this pop up a lot on Twitter, where people normally follow others who share their common worldview instead of being open to contrary opinions so when someone goes to search for something, they find a validation of their worldview and not something that gives them pause to think about it.
Hi, Darcie. Thank you for your comments. People can’t help but prefer the view they want to see, and at the same time the algorithm carries its own bias, which is something I wanted to discuss in the project. Maybe people should get out of this cocoon of information and spend some time thinking about the wider world. If people are trapped in this cocoon, then the bias will deepen and deepen.
Yes I very much agree with you! If we can figure out a way to do this I think it could be very influential in making changes to people demanding policy changes in society instead of just going with what they are told is good for them.