The Internet is awash with information, to the extent that many now regard the information deluge as being excessive and harming our ability to find valuable information.

A number of filtering and curating tools have been developed in response to the deluge, but researchers are concerned that these tools do little but narrow down the breadth of information we consume as people filter in only content that they’re predisposed to agree with.

Confirmation bias online

“We tend to look for information that confirms our points of view,” researchers from the University of Buffalo say. “It bolsters self-esteem, helps us effectively cope with political information overload, but on the other hand, it means we’re minimizing exposure to information that challenges us.

“Technology allows us to customize our online information environment.”

The researchers developed a model, which was documented in a recently published paper, that looked at the impact this ability to customize the information we receive has on areas such as politics.

Customization on steroids

Suffice to say, being able to filter what we consume has always been feasible, whether through choosing the television channels we watch or the newspapers we buy.  This is not something that’s new to the Internet.

This process is slightly different to the one we undertake online however, and the authors contend that the very concept of selective exposure is somewhat counter-intuitive.

“Scholars disagree about whether the internet makes us more politically closed-minded, or whether it exposes us to more politically diverse points of view,” they say.

The authors suggest that the sheer volume of information available to us forces us to be more selective than ever before.  What’s more, the diversity of information allows us to select the information that best matches our beliefs, whilst the technology provides us with the control to achieve this.

“In a two-newspaper town, readers still might look at the rival paper in addition to their favored publication because the newspaper choices were relatively limited, but online readers can find and then spend hours looking only at content that perfectly fits their psychological and political preferences,” the authors say.

Taking the bias out of our hands

Increasingly, this selection bias is not even something we consciously control, as many of the websites we enjoy use algorithms to filter content according to our past interests.

Facebook is a classic example of this, and the site remains a hugely popular source of news content for many web users.  Twitter operates a similar system of filtering what we receive.

Whilst such technologies have clear benefits in helping us manage the information overload, they have nonetheless had a detrimental effect on political discourse as they have helped to create an echo chamber online, which increases our level of political polarity.

Maybe there’s a market out there for someone to develop an algorithm specifically designed to foster greater levels of thought diversity?