A Summary of Chapters 3 through 5

     Chapters three through five, “The Adderall Society”, “The You Loop”, and “The Public is Irrelevant”, further delve into the problems posed by a filter bubble.  Like the medicine Adderall, used to help those with Attention Deficit Disorder, the filter bubble allows its users to cut out what may be distracting and unhelpful but rather help focus on what is important.  But also like the medicine, too much of either could result in a single-minded focus and eliminate one’s creativity, a horrible result as creativity is important for the advancement and development of new, important ideas and diversity, especially on the Web.  In “The You Loop” it is addressed how these algorithms that are supposed to find out who we are actually provide poor representations of ourselves and can actually “be even more discriminatory than people would be”, something that could be avoided more if these algorithms left more room to give people the benefit of the doubt (129).  Lastly, Pariser brought attention to that from the censorship of the internet, “Some of the biggest and most important problems fail to reach our view at all” (149).  What news brought to us will be things that we find more interesting while leaving out other outside opinions, which can only be avoided if we look beyond our “narrow self-interest” and welcome in other worldly views and stories.


Works Cited:

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.