Bubbles filtering bubbles, or as my media lecturer used to say: echo chambers. Whatever you call them, they are here to stay. Information spaces in which we move depending on our social and political attitude. And who are increasingly separating themselves (and us) from each other.
Who is guilty? Especially ourselves. Since time immemorial, our own social behavior has made us prefer to be with ourselves. Logically, I prefer to read the news that I enjoy. It is better to talk to people who do not contradict me. I want to be encouraged in my ideas.
This is how we behave on the Internet. Where we feel understood, we spend more time. And that means more money for internet moguls. They are churning out huge sums of money in online oases of well-being that are made especially for us. And they do this with the help of complex algorithms – they did not exist in the Middle Ages.
Flirting with a right-wing extremist in a supermarket
Concretely, this means that anyone who spends a lot of time on the Internet runs the risk of suddenly receiving information only from their own rows. And what surrounds you becomes your own reality. We read about it over and over. However, it’s easy to forget.
Example: since my bubble is not inhuman, I assumed that this applies to everyone. So I don’t expect to accidentally flirt with the guy from Junge Tat while standing in line at the supermarket checkout. But it could happen! Right-wing extremism is back in Switzerland – for some reason I didn’t record (or hide) it in my bubble.
The scary thing is that they no longer run around with bald heads and steel-toed boots, and can almost be mistaken for a hipster from a progressive leftist bookstore. But the ideology is different, much more extreme. And echo chambers are partly to blame.
There is no way back to the bubble either.
The victory of the fascist party of Georgia Meloni in the elections in our neighbor Italy also came as a shock to me and my bubble. Given Mussolini’s past, I thought such an election was unimaginable. But it seems to me that I live in a different reality.
It’s all scary. All this makes you disappear back into your own bubble. Take your frustrations out. Where people can still understand you. At the same time, we will have to deal with this fragmentation – it is dangerous. But how? You have put me in a dead end. Algorithms win.
Noah Dibbasey (21) studies social sciences at the University of Bern. She writes to Bleek every second Friday.