Social Media: Making the Personal Impersonal
August 25, 2011
Search engines are now using social media data to rank query results. As crazy as it sounds, your Tweets could now alter the way Google gives you information on such benign things as “George Washington” or “grilled cheese sandwiches.” eSchool News takes a look at how “New Web-Search Formulas Have Huge Implications for Students and Society.”
Search results now differ from person to person based on algorithms have been altered to include social media data. Knowing that most people don’t go past the second page of results, they have tailored their ranking system to consider links you have clicked on and create a filter system based on those previous links. This isn’t something ground breaking since Amazon and Netflix have been using it for years to recommend books and movies, but is new to the major search engines.
At the 2011 Technology, Entertainment, and Design talk, Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble, shared his reservations with the “invisible algorithmic editing of the web.” He believes it only shows us what it thinks we want and not what we need to see.
[I]t was believed that the web would widen our connections with the world and expose us to new perspectives, Pariser said: Instead of being limited to the newspapers, books, and other writings available in our local communities, we would have access to information from all over the globe. But thanks to these new search-engine formulas, he said, the internet instead is coming to represent ‘a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers [of information] to algorithmic ones.’ Yet, algorithms don’t have the kind of embedded ethics that human editors have, he noted. If algorithms are going to curate the world for us, then ‘we need to make sure they’re not just keyed to [personal] relevance—they also should show us things that are important, or challenging, or uncomfortable.’
It seems that search engines may be focusing on personal factors, but are not personalizing the process. The user has no control over results. That customization is left to a rigid algorithm. If a restaurant says that they make burgers “made-to-order,” then I expect to be able to pick mustard and onions on one visit, and pick cheese and ketchup on the next visit. The server should not just look at my past orders and make an educated guess. There is nothing “personal” about that.
Could this lead some well meaning people down an unintended and risky path to censorship-by-computer. Users must gain more control over these search formulas. There are certainly times when social media parameters are acceptable, but sometimes you want and need to see the other side. It depends if you are settling an argument between your friends over song lyrics or writing a thesis on communism. Until users are offered more liberal control, I think this “personal” ranking system will actually suppress and limit a lot of important information that users are seeking. The social impact on a search comes at a pretty high price.
Jennifer Wensink, August 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
