[BEHIND THE SCREENS Who decides what I see online?]
Hi, my name’s Taylor.
I study the internet and journalism
and how we as citizens receive information about the world.
In the olden days when people got information,
it was mostly decided by people.
There were humans that decided what we needed to know.
So, when we opened the newspaper or turned on the evening news, it was a person that
decided what we heard and saw.
The result of that is that we all knew similar things.
Now the internet has changed everything.
When you go online, when you open an application,
what you see is determined not by a person
but by a machine.
And this is awesome in a lot of ways.
It allows you to use Google Maps, it allows you to order food online,
it allows you to connect with friends around the world and share information.
But there are aspects of this machine that we need to think really carefully about
because they determine the information that we all receive
as citizens in a society and in a democracy.
So, when you open up an app
and you’re shown a picture in your Snapchat feed,
all of that information is determined by this machine
and that machine is driven by the incentives
of the company that owns the website or owns the application.
And the incentive is for you to spend
as much time as possible inside that application.
So, they do things that make you feel very good about being there.
They allow people to like your photos,
they show you content that they think you want to see
that will either make you really happy or really angry,
that will get an emotional response from you to keep you there.
That is because they want to show you as many ads as possible when you’re there
because that is their business model.
They’re also taking that same opportunity of you being in their app
to collect data about you.
And they use these data to create detailed profiles of your life and your behaviour,
and these profiles can then be used to target more ads back to you.
And that then determines what you see as well.
But all of this isn’t just about the business model of these companies,
it actually has an impact on our democracy
because what we each see on the internet is highly customized to us,
to what we like, to what we believe, to what we want to see or want to believe.
And that means that as a society,
we no longer all have a shared set of knowledge
which is hard for a democracy that requires us to work together
and know the same things to make decisions about our lives together.
When we all know different things
and we’re all being siloed into our own little bubbles of information,
it’s incredibility difficult for us to get along with one another.
We have no shared experience or shared knowledge.
So, I think it’s really important that we think critically about the information we
receive online and about the companies and structures that determine
what we see on the internet.