Nowadays, thanks to the abundance and the accessibility of online information sources, people have access to an overwhelmingly wide range of information. Since the early days of this online information explosion, many researchers were concerned about how the internet will affect and shape the individual’s exposure to information. In other words, how the selective exposure theory will manifest in online news and information sources.
One of the decent studies in this field was presented by R. Kelly Garrett in his work Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users. This work analyses factors that affect the selection of an online news source by a user, as well as the time a user will spend reading the selected source. The results of this study tend to reinforce the set of initial hypotheses made by the author. These hypotheses could be summarized in that the motivation for a user to favor a news item that matches his opinion over another that challenges it is to seek opinion reinforcement rather than to avert opinion challenge.
Although the author mentions that these results are somehow reassuring in terms of the worries that the internet contributes to creating “Echo Chambers”, there is an important missing piece. This paper studies the effect of the internet as a resource that gives users abundant choices and control over what they read. The fear here was that users selectivity may directly create the Echo Chamber effect. The missing piece here is the contribution of the technology itself in creating this effect through personalization techniques. Although the study shows that users are less likely to avert an opinion challenging information item by itself, the continuous tendency to favor opinion-reinforcing information under the presence of these personalization techniques could lead to a misperceived dominance of their own opinions and an gradual isolation from opposing ideas.
The effect of selective exposure along with the online recommendation and personalization technologies was of concern to Paul Resnick et al. as presented in their work Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure. In their work, they survey existing solutions that aim to encourage the exposure to diverse and cross-cutting content. The surveyed solutions include user interface designs that encourage a user to read opposing opinions or that shows to a user how balanced is his reads.
Despite the attractiveness and creativity of the solutions proposed to promote exposure to diversity, it is necessary to keep moving forward towards a comprehensive understanding of why these “Filter Bubbles” exist. R. Kelly’s study, as well as Eytan Bakshy et al.’s work Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook, suggest that the choices of individuals play the most significant role in shaping their online exposure. Suppose that we agree to this fact, an important question is: Do hidden personalization algorithms by themselves cause more limit to diversified exposure? or are they only a reflection of the individual’s behavior?. To answer these questions and to have a complete understanding and enhancement of online exposure, we need to connect some dots from the research on selective exposure as a human nature, auditing of online personalization algorithms, and techniques to promote a more diversified online exposure.
Understanding an individual’s motivations, studying their role, as well as that of other effects in driving the online recommendation algorithms, could lead to the best strategy to develop a more diversity-promoting online world.
