I recently took a mini-vacation to the mountains here in Alberta and I spent a couple nights in a hotel near the ski hills.
All sorts of local folks do this… and then spend their evenings chilling in front of the television with a cozy drink in hand. The last guy who had my room left his social media accounts logged in on the television in what was now my room, so I’m pretty sure that’s what he had been up to, too.
Algorithms, in case you didn’t already know this, drop us into informational silos. They are feedback loops, showing us increasingly more—and more extreme versions—of what we have already watched. And because of this, we don’t often get to peek into how other people are being walled up in different kinds of silos completely opposite of our own.
This guy, another Albertan—I did some research with his username—had been mainlining right leaning video content like it was oxygen. The account was logged in when I opened up the app and I clicked through to see what he had been watching recently, and it amounted to a steady diet of single-perspective politics that ran so counter to the reality in which I live I was almost nauseous reading the click-bait titles and thumbnails.
I was kinder than I should have been, and logged him out, taking more care with his privacy that he was obviously capable.
But I did spend the weekend pondering how any of us can break through the silos that these platforms are erecting around all of us. That is, if I were to meet this guy in real life and attempt to have a conversation, how to do you bridge the gap when the things he is watching are literally dehumanizing me, my family and my friends.
How could a single conversation attempt to compete with a firehose of hate and misinformation?
How do you live together when the things these kinds of folks are watching are pushing the idea that certain people are not even worth living with?