globalization
We spent 6 weeks on the Globalization project. After studying globalization each student picked a globalization topic to research and write an Op ed about. The Op ed's had to be between 750 and 1000 words and argue your perspective on the topic you chose. We designed and drew political cartoons after studying cartoon elements that go with our Op ed. My topic was how the internet personalizes search results for each individual. This perspective is shown in my cartoon below. We had the choice to add color or leave it black and white. Scroll to the bottom to see my project reflection.
Political Cartoon
Cartoon Drafts
Life in an Online Bubble
Internet activist, Eli Pariser, asked several friends to Google Egypt a few weeks before his TED Talk. One friend got links for pages about protests, and current events. The other friend didn’t get any links for current events, and instead he got links about traveling there, with images of camels and pretty deserts. Two people who Googled the same thing got totally different results. This is because Google was giving them the links a “computer” thought they would want.
I go to Animas High School, which is a school that integrates technology into everyday life. Whether it’s doing research for a project in humanities or looking up words in Spanish, I use the internet for school constantly. If I’m getting personalized search results that are different than everyone else, how can I hope to compete with peers? In the TED Talk, Beware Online Filter Bubbles, the speaker said, “And where this moves us very quickly, is toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see” (Pariser). All of us have experienced overprotective mother moments. Times when we want to hangout with someone, and our mom refuses because she thinks she’s protecting us. If Google hides everything bad, then it’s trapping us into an infinite circle of safe information.
The internet has become personalized for each individual, and the problem with this is that it only shows us what’s safe and familiar, instead of what’s uncomfortable or challenging, similar to the behavior of mothers.
The internet is rapidly becoming more and more intertwined with our daily lives. We use it for school, work, and for personal enjoyment. But what many of us don’t realize is that the internet isn’t traditional anymore. There are algorithms (a set of calculations computers use) present in every part of our online lives that filter everything we search for. Eli Pariser provided this insight in his TED Talk; “Even if you’re logged out, one engineer told me there are 57 signals that Google looks at. Everything from where you’re sitting, what type of computer you’re on, what kind of browser you’re using, to where you’re located, that it uses to personally tailor your inquiry results” (Pariser). I called Google to find out what these signals are. After over half an hour and 6 different location centers, I finally reached a real person. Without hesitating she told me that information can’t be revealed. It feels like an invasion of privacy for Google to be searching through everything I do on my personal computer in my personal life, without telling me they’re doing it. But the biggest violation is that I get no say in this, no say in a very personal issue.
Using those algorithms and signals, computers sort through all the information about your subject. The links that come up first are the links it thinks you want to see based on things like your search history and political views. Eli Pariser calls it a filter bubble, and this is what it is: “Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don’t decide what gets in — and more importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out” (Pariser). As Americans we pride ourselves on our freedom, but with the dawn of these algorithms, we have lost that freedom, and lose more with each day spent online.
One of the problems with this is that most of us see only the good in the world. If it was just Google creating these algorithms it wouldn’t be too bad, but “there’s a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo news, the biggest news site on the internet, is now personalized. Different people get different things” (Pariser). I was researching current news a little while ago and I went to all the main news websites. All that came up was good news about things like the Olympics, the war in Afghanistan ending, and the Palestinians and Israelis discussing a peace agreement. I couldn’t find anything bad, even when I tried looking for bad news. This is that mother figure stepping in to show me what’s safe. When I do look for world news, I look at the good things - the news that won’t make me feel guilty or responsible. Because if we’re being honest, no one wants to look at the news that makes them feel guilty and obliged to help. The problem with this mind set is that if enough people have it, then we can all just float around in our personal filter bubbles, ignorant to everything else because we’re letting mom make those decisions for us.
Our nation was founded on the idea of democracy and the right to make decisions for ourselves. With the growing advancements in technology, it was believed that technology would accomplish something new: it would connect everyone across the globe. While it has done that in some aspects, in others it has torn us apart. This is from the introduction of the book Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work, “This chapter concludes that a growing digital divide between the “wired” and “unwired” is perhaps the greatest threat to civic literacy, raising the frightening possibility that the new technology will further exclude those already lacking access to knowledge necessary to be active informed citizens” (Milner 9). For democracy to succeed the citizens need to be informed about the world and their country. With the internet filtering information, citizens aren’t being informed.
We have given technology complete control over us. In a battle against such a complex and unknown enemy, how can our democracy survive? The internet has the power to hold and bind us in shackles that were forged by our ignorance, leaving us powerless and vulnerable in a fake, but safe, bubble.
Word Count: 1000
Works Cited
Milner, Henry. "Plan of the Book, Part Three." Introduction. Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work. N.p.: Tufts, 2002. 9. Civil Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Books.google.com. Web. 19 Feb. 2014. <http://books.google.com/books?id=jOMuqXpMfuEC&pg=PA9&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false>.
Eli Pariser: Beware Online "filter Bubbles" Eli Pariser. Our Digital Lives. TED Talks, May 2011. Web. 02 Feb. 2014. <http://www.ted.com/playlists/26/our_digital_lives.html>.
Pariser, Eli. "Brain Pickings." Interview by Maria Popova. Brain Pickings RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014. <http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/05/12/the-filter-bubble/>.
Project Reflection
Globalization is a sphere of influence continually shifting to mold and contain the modern world within it. In his book Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman makes this statement about globalization; “Today it is the overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country, and we need to understand it as such.” The main ideas of globalization consist of integration, linking people with current trends, merging different cultures, and connecting everyone using the newest and the fastest. We spent 6 weeks studying globalization and learning what it is. We each picked different topics of globalization to focus on and researched that topic. Then we wrote Op-Ed papers about our topic. An Op-Ed has to be between 750 and 1000 words, and argue your perspective about your topic. We also spent time studying political cartoons and common elements. We designed and drew our own political cartoons to go alongside our Op-Ed’s. My topic was how the internet is personalizing all search results for each individual. I used a metaphor (challenge extension) to show this in both my cartoon and Op-Ed.
Before this project I didn’t know what globalization was, but now that I understand it I can see both the pros and cons. To me the Jihad vs. McWorld aspect of globalization was shocking how true it was when the guy who wrote it was predicting 20 years into the future. Learning about the media and the internet’s role in globalization was really interesting to me, and also surprising. This was a great project that related to us personally as we’re the generation to inherit this globalized world.
I was really struggling to pick ideas I liked for my cartoon at the beginning, so I didn’t really end up spending very much time on my first draft, and it was pretty awful. The labels were really small and hard to read. The picture barely took up half the paper, and the caption made no sense. My final draft takes up the whole page and everything’s spread out. My labels are large (although they really could be bigger) and my caption actually makes sense. I made my symbols clearer and it’s a little difficult but most people can figure out the perspective of the cartoon without having to read my paper first. I totally changed the way I laid out my idea so it better represents my Op-Ed now. When drawing birds I learned it’s better to just make your own “feathers” then to try and copy it the exact way it was in the picture. I’m not very good at drawing so I’m actually really proud of my final draft cartoon.
I’ve never had to write an Op-Ed before. Op-Ed’s, unlike most writing assignments, requires a word count between 750 and 1000 words. For me this was really hard because I’m used to writing fictional stories and assignments where it doesn’t matter as long as you get the point across. I like to write 3-4 fancy sentences with big words that sound really good, but take 4 sentences to get the point across. For this assignment I had to learn how to merge those 4 beautiful sentences into one sentence that was concise and able to get the point across. To do this I had to cut a lot of my descriptive “metaphor” adjectives because they were really just fluff to make the sentences sound good. I didn’t realize how hard this would be for me. I get really attached to my adjectives and sentence fluff, but they were the least important and I had points to make that were more important. As frustrating as this was, it was great for me to try to learn how to write concisely.