Bursting the Social Network Bubble
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2016
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bobby Friction has started to realise that his day-to-day online activities are not only being monitored but in some senses manipulated. How often he interacts with specific friends, pages or sites sculpts and filters everything and everyone he comes into contact with online. Since the Brexit vote and the US election these bubbles have become a really big issue - with talk of fake news, post-truth politics and online communities increasingly divided. When, like Bobby, you decide you've had enough of living in a social media bubble, what can you do to change things? Is it possible for an ordinary person a user of social media to beat the system or is it only technology nerds who can do it? And really - is there any benefit to breaking out of the bubble?
The Producer is Perminder Khatkar.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:05.0 | There's comfort in agreement, less hostility, more nodding. |
| 0:10.0 | It's like having your opinions shouted back at you in the mirror. It's vindicating. |
| 0:15.0 | We have a tendency anyway to seek out views which reinforce our own and we have a tendency to discount evidence which contradicts us. I'm Rhyanna Dylan and today's |
| 0:25.1 | seriously interesting story is all about the online echo chambers we live in. |
| 0:29.2 | Fake news on Facebook, the shock some of us felt at the Brexit vote or Donald Trump's win, |
| 0:35.6 | perhaps it was because of these bubbles. |
| 0:37.9 | I know that there are other ways of seeing the world and I am happy that people have them but I just don't want to be in their world. |
| 0:47.0 | Just browsing through my Facebook timeline or my Twitter feed, I can always predict what's going to come up. |
| 0:53.0 | That girl from uni who is constantly traveling. |
| 0:57.0 | A couple of adverts for things that I've Googled recently. |
| 1:00.0 | And I know the internet's watching me. It's not like I'm paranoid, just that we all know there's algorithms tracking our moves. |
| 1:08.0 | I just didn't realize quite how much. |
| 1:11.0 | I'd always thought of Google as this kind of tool for understanding |
| 1:14.6 | kind of almost objectively what was happening out in the world and now it's kind of |
| 1:18.7 | bending back toward me and I was at the center of the universe. The |
| 1:22.4 | seriously podcast is brought to you by BBC Radio 4. |
| 1:26.0 | And today, Bobby Friction is bursting the social network bubble. |
| 1:30.0 | It's been 10 minutes since I woke up and I'm already manically searching and |
| 1:36.7 | flicking through my timeline on Facebook as well as Twitter as well. |
| 1:41.1 | Yeah. No I know I know I know I know anyway. |
| 1:48.3 | I'll start again. It's been a couple of minutes since I woke up and I've already been |
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