I knew this years ago when noticing how Facebook was adjusting feeds. People that I didn’t view started getting filtered out and the more I looked at a particular topic I started seeing a lot more suggestions around those topics. Very specific suggested posts and articles too; extremely well targeted. I became acutely aware that I was inadvertently being steered down a path by a feed of information. I was personally looking at motivational material and adventure related sports, but it was easy to see that this was being done across the board. The problem is that the more information you see directed at you in a particular context or standpoint confirms people’s bias on all sorts of things. Obviously, politcally we have seen this and Bezos himself mentions in the article linked below how it could absolutely be used to help autocratic regimes.
Although people truely feel that they themselves cannot be manipulable by this confirmation bias or even by marketing. I am pretty sure that over $500 billion a year is spent in the US on marketing for a reason. It works, you are influenced in ways you won’t ever realize regardless if you feel like every decision is your own.
I understand that marketing and social media feeds based on previous history creating a confirmation bias are different areas. However, they work in the same manner by influencing without the person even realizing it. It reminds me of David Foster Wallace talking about “operating on your default setting”. I think people often forget how to think and remain aware in day to day life:
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now. I wish you way more than luck. “