Social Filtering Worksheet

1173 Words5 Pages

And… we’re back to it! Hope everyone enjoyed his or her break. Can’t believe I have one semester left of university. We finally moved our office space next door so we are no longer crammed behind the Riverside BIA office. Passerby’s can see the Network along Queen Street East through the window and we have a little gallery of paintings by the window. This improves how the AN externally communicates with the community. It’s an inviting and engaging new space with A LOT more room. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll be helping out with that more in the next upcoming weeks: Extreme Makeover Network edition. This week, I researched which AN members made submissions to The Artists’ Project Contemporary Fair and updated it onto a spreadsheet. …show more content…

Social filtering is defined as “the selective engagement with people, communication and other information as a result of the recommendation of others” (Wilson, 2014, p. 218). On one hand, Internet information filtering is essential because there is too much information to navigate in a timely manner. Nevertheless, social filtering is detrimental to the economic and political sphere by contributing to the digital divide on a global scale. Wilson cites Eli Pariser’s, The Filter Bubble, which discusses how the personalized web is shaping our identity and altering the way we encounter ideas and information. Social filtering is a type of collaborative filtering, which identifies and reveals information on the basis of user or peer recommendations and shared taste assumptions (Wilson, 2014). Consequentially, social filtering also deduces users relationships in cyberspace based on their “Likes.” One of the reason users “Like” so many things is because there is something in it for them. A company may offer a promotion or benefit from liking their organization. Our personal information becomes currency for the design of third-party applications and entices advertisers to tailor corresponding adverts (2014). According to Van Dijck, “it is crucial to understand the new role of users as both content providers and data providers” otherwise known as “prosumer” (Wilson, 2014, p. 223). We either upload our own content or willingly providing our information to SNS technologies and its