Behind the Screens: Who decides what I see online?

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[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.