Bubbles filter? Towards an algorithmic phenomenology

Abstract

This paper is a reflexion of the implications in the social life of algorithmic systems that make up the different digital platforms for access and participate take part of the web. The concept of filter bubbles provided by Eli Pariser in his TED conference in 2011 is the starting point. This is subjected to a critical reading with the intention of making explicit its most powerful edges, that is, those that open the way to a vast field of research on our current media ecology in which little has been ventured from the Hispanic American academic discourses.

After a condensed pointing out the key points that make up the posing of filter bubbles, it leads to a brief genealogy of “cookies”. That is, the technological development that offered the essential digital mnemic traces for the opening towards personalization of the contents on the web.

In the critical stage of work it is put in crisis the metaphor of the bubble and its heuristic capacity to apprehend in its complexity the impact of machinic selection criteria in our lifestyles that, today might say, they are technological lifestyles (Lash, 2004). Instead, he proposes the concept of algorithmic Phenomenology, concluding on the need for a dialogical and/or metacommunicative relationship between users and algorithmic systems on which they experience the world. Finally presents the results of an empirical experiment of a limited nature in which it explores on the one hand, the truth of the hypothesis that presents Google as a platform that bubbles (isolates informatively) its users, and DuckDuckGo as a generic search engine. As well as the degree of knowledge possessed by users of some configuration options offered by the search engines and how much they are willing to intervene them.