Beyond filter bubbles: a story of AirPods and bubbles
To feel alive, it might be time to reintroduce friction into our connected worlds
The advantage of a community is to have contributions that stimulate reflection! In response to my latest newsletter (The voice, a new frontier of extimacy),
developed a striking perspective on the idea of a 'bubble' when interacting with our smartphones, earphones on our ears.“This asynchronous and a-topic communication also creates a disconnect with the surrounding environment, a desynchronization.”
Thomas Bucaille
The filter bubble, which focuses on information and intellectual and cultural isolation, has been a well-known phenomenon since Eli Pariser's work. In short, platforms would trap users in a vast array of content suggested by algorithms based on our previous actions. They might reinforce our biases by suggesting only what we would like to consume at a given moment. However, the physical dimension of the bubble is arguably the most fascinating—and concerning—element of recent months.
From an informational bubble to a physical bubble
As often happens, advertising offers a marker of an era, a concrete manifestation of change. Apple's ad film "Quiet the noise" for its new AirPods Pro is revealing in itself.
The 69-second commercial shows a woman walking through a bustling city. The sources of these sounds—human, objects—seem to defy the laws of gravity, thanks to the active noise cancellation technology of AirPods Pro (of course). The heroine's journey through the city builds up: the sounds get louder and seem to be projected far away from her towards the clouds. Jackhammer, marching band, car horns. The only moment she deactivates her AirPods is to buy a smoothie, the only physical interaction with another human through a consumption act. Before reactivating her earphones, to the sound of "Where is my Mind?" covered by Tkay Maidza, her bag slung over her shoulder, and the world not at her feet but in the sky. Without knowing what this person is thinking, as if the promise was to isolate oneself from external disturbances. Even though these disturbances can be joyful!
This metaphor of 2023 is instructive: we're throwing everything up in the air, but we don't seem to know what to dream about.
We're throwing everything up in the air, but we don't seem to know what to dream about.
According to a study by Wunderman-Thompson, 61% of people in the United States and the United Kingdom agree that "life seems less exciting than before," and 73% say they "just want to feel something, to feel alive." Oh, really!
We need a destination and a check-in counter.
While we cross each other like ships in the night in spaces that can remain impermeable, the Pew Research Center has conducted extensive research on the future of digital spaces and democracy. Zizi Papacharissi of the University of Illinois-Chicago offers a pessimistic analysis:
"We enter these [digital] spaces with our baggage—there is no online check-in counter where we enter and leave this baggage behind. This baggage includes toxicity. Toxicity is a human characteristic, not an inherent element of digital life. Unless we design spaces to explicitly prohibit/exploit and select against toxicity, we will not see improvement."
Zizi Papacharissi
Implicitly, allowing individuals to register on platforms without any "barriers" to entry or any destination, under the guise of individual freedom, might be a bad idea. The spaces created in this way tend to reinforce their own impermeability. This is not contradictory to the fact that these "spaces," sometimes inhabited by millions of members, can be a mix of sometimes contradictory affinities, like Netflix's famous 1300 "Tastes communities." Symbols, values, but also the physical habits of consulting and digital activities deeply imprint a new spatial representation, almost physiological, on people's flesh.
Against the dictatorship of the present: the ability to rebel
The dictatorship of this enclosing present is slowly being challenged by users, activist groups, and even brands. Walls are meant to be torn down and redesigned, even in their digital expressions.
The most radical solution may be to become a "non-user," as mentioned in a previous newsletter where I quoted Silvio Lorusso, who, for the journal Tèque, reflects on his essay titled "Liquider l'utilisateur" (Liquidate the user). His demonstration: the individual who refuses to use social media might ultimately be freer than users, and even hackers. Opposing a veto to the rules of a social network is paradoxically a way to reclaim one's space.
Other initiatives propose to resynchronize with others by restoring the juice with the neighboring environment.
Music festivals banned from smartphones like "This Never Happened" are beginning to attract many people. #TurnYourBack, Dove's initiative encouraging turning away from the augmented reality filter "Bold Glamour," is also a way to say no and set limits in connected worlds. In Singapore, a counterculture led by the Rave scene allows for the liberation of the individual surrounded by thousands of others, where social networks become anecdotal compared to the sweat and vibrations of the dance floor. We are no longer alone, together, we are ourselves, together.
Taking back control of space is, for me, in the ability to assume the modularity of platforms and to assume our contradictions and nuances. I love this feedback from
in her latest newsletter "Three months on dating apps," which provides a more optimistic insight:“I realized that my fear that 'all the good guys are taken' was unfounded. And then, I no longer feel like I'm subject to the hermetism of my circles of friends.”
Louise Hourcade
And quoting the philosopher Charles Pépin: "The virtual has the virtue of being able to extract us from our social and professional circles, of cracking open windows to people, spaces we would never have access to without it."
In other words, to burst the bubbles that lock us in, we must take control of the tool and dictate our own agendas. What many opinion leaders naturally do on social media and at different scales. The difference is that it will probably be necessary to make this literacy more open rather than letting individual traits fend for themselves. At the risk of favoring only the one who naturally speaks the most or who is more skilled at "cracking the algorithm": that's not how you build a society in common spaces."