Monday, April 15, 2013

Journal #11 - Filter Bubble. Good or Bad?



                Watching one news station is bad because instead of having your own thoughts and opinions about current events the viewer inherits the opinion of the one news station.  I avoid this form of brainwashing by watching many TV news stations and then after evaluating the points and opinions of the topics that I saw I create my own opinion.  I noticed a "filter bubble" when I was deployed in Iraq, when I went to the dining facility to eat chow there was only one news station that aired on the flat screen TVs all the time.  It was MSNBC.  I found this odd and wondered why only MSNBC was on the TVs instead of Fox News, CNN, or any other news channel.  After some research I found out that General Electric owns MSNBC.  It turns out that General Electric has a lot of contracts with the military so naturally the company is going to be pro war and brainwash the troops into thinking that being in Iraq is a good thing.  Sitting in the dining facility and watching the news while eating my food, I noticed that it always mentioned how even though the country was in debt billions of dollars and couldn't afford the war, occupying Iraq and fighting the war was a good thing.  Where is the logic in that?
                Filter bubbles are molding and shaping our society to think and act a certain way.  These filters are telling males and females to act a certain way that are different from each other, but then at the same time trying to create a custom profile to cater to our likes.  Whenever I visit Amazon.com to do some online shopping it tells me what I should buy.  It is always the suggests the new releases that are usually action movies, but the only reason why I shop online is to find merchandise that I can't find anywhere else.  The latest Bruce Willis movie doesn't interest me when browsing Amazon's online store because I can get that anywhere, even the checkout lane at Dillon's, but it thinks that it interests me just because I am a male between the ages of 25 - 30.  The next time I look up something to buy for my sister's birthday Amazon is going to flood my inbox with sales on Justin Beiber merchandise for a month straight.  I also noticed that Facebook flashes advertisements relating to the military because I listed that I was in the US Army in my employment history.  But now that I'm out of the Army I don't want anything to do with the military.  Nice try Facebook.
                Our society needs to be educated on how to create our own thoughts and opinions and not just regurgitate what we heard on the news.  We need to learn to open our eyes and our minds and listen to many sources before coming to a conclusion that we stamp as our own.  We need to learn to base the credibility of the opinion on the logic, and not who said it.  If we neglect to do this it will be only a matter of time before we lose our freedom and become pawns in a game of chess.  Before we become drones and lose our freewill.

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