This week’s topic of media consumption really had me pondering what I actually spend my time looking at when I am engaging with social media. As a mom of 4 (soon to be 5), full-time educator and wife I find that I have to greatly limit how much time I spend on social media because I can get easily sucked in and lose out on time to make important personal connections with those around me. Due to this, I have spent very little time on Twitter. My go-to is Facebook!
I also use Facebook to help promote my side business of selling nail polish strips. I am part of numerous groups that include my team members where we can collaborate and share ideas. One of the topics that come up all of the time is making sure to drive engagement within our personal groups because of “Facebook’s algorithms” hiding posts and information from people in our groups. After watching Eli Pariser’s TED on
“filter bubbles,” I realized that there might actually be something behind all of this talk. According to Pariser, "a person’s filter bubble is their own universe of unique information that they live in online and they do not have any say what filters in or out of their bubble." I realized that all of my teammates that talk about "Facebook's algorithms" had actually been right, this was actually happening. Taking a step back and having time to reflect, I realized that generally, I find that it is the same people constantly interacting with my posts.
I had noticed before but did not think about it, the ads that pop up on my Facebook feed directly relate to the different pages that I spend time interacting with and/or services that are similar to pages that I interact with. I ended up going back through Facebook and looking at the pages that I am interested in and seeing which pages, I actually see information and posts from and which have disappeared from my feed.
"Screenshots of Pages Followed on FB" by Melissa Bridges
This experience gave me the opportunity to really look at what information is filtered through to my Facebook feed. I ended up spending some time going through and unfollowing some pages that I have no interest in anymore. I then went back and looked over some of the pages that I have not been receiving information from that I would still like to see. I went back specifically to these pages and scrolled through and interacted with posts on these pages. I ended up going back to a few specific pages for a couple of days after noticing that I was not seeing them on my feed anymore in hopes of them once again being filtered into my "bubble" of information. Here's to keeping my fingers crossed that it worked!
References:
Antonells, A. (2016, November 12). Facebook Google gif. [Gif]. Giphy. https://gph.is/2fsxRyH
Altman, G. (2018, December 13). Pixabay. [Image]. https://pixabay.com/images/id-3870185/
TED. (2011, February). Beware online "filter bubbles" | Elia Pariser. [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/B8ofWFx525s
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