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NewsDay

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The filter bubble

Columnists
I borrowed this title from Eli Pariser who was getting increasingly concerned at the results he was getting from the Internet. On a hunch, he asked two friends to Google Egypt at the height of the Nile Revolution. The one friend, who has an interest in politics, received links pointing him to political news on […]

I borrowed this title from Eli Pariser who was getting increasingly concerned at the results he was getting from the Internet.

On a hunch, he asked two friends to Google Egypt at the height of the Nile Revolution.

The one friend, who has an interest in politics, received links pointing him to political news on the country while the other received links to many travel and tourism sites linked to the same country!

Presenting his findings on Ted.Com and in answer to a Q and A session with Amazon.com Pariser says: “We’re used to thinking of the Internet like an enormous library, with services like Google providing a universal map. But that’s no longer really the case.

Sites from Google and Facebook to Yahoo News and the New York Times are now increasingly personalised, based on your Web history, they filter information to show you the stuff they think you want to see. That can be very different from what everyone else sees, or from what we need to see.

Your filter bubble is this unique, personal universe of information created just for you by this array of personalising filters. It’s invisible and it’s becoming more and more difficult to escape.

I am expanding on my piece last week on how if you see the beauty in things you tend to gravitate towards working to attaining them. I want to flip it on its back and ask the reverse question: What filter bubbles have you created for yourself?

What are those core beliefs that you carry in your world view that stop you from achieving your full potential?

This world view thing that I keep harping on about is either your greatest ally or your worst enemy.

How many times do you hear yourself say: it is because I am a woman or black when you sub-consciously give permission to others to put you down in whatever situation you are dealing with.

You might want to look at the career of Hillary Clinton to understand how this woman was determined and destined for the top or at least very near it from her law school days.

Like him or not, Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who astutely, ruthlessly and, perhaps coldly, made his ascent to the highest seat of power in France.

His world view was as stark as he is conservative stating “what made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood” following his abandonment by his father.

I remember Professor Lovemore Mbigi telling me and a group of others at a workshop how people were sent to talk to him to make him more reasonable and yet that is the very thing you sometimes have to flee from.

I received something about the word unreasonable the other day which I would like to share:

Theodore H White once wrote: “To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.” Jonathan Lockwood Huie elaborates thus:

“Mostly, life works out best when you are reasonable, that is, when you approach life with sound judgment (as defined by average people in your community). But is it always best to be reasonable?

Heroes are not reasonable. Sound judgement does not lead people to risk their own lives to help others. Poets and philosophers are not reasonable. Social activists are not reasonable.

Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King (Jr) and Mother Teresa were not reasonable. Explorers and inventors are not reasonable. Amelia Earhart, Robert Peary, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein were not reasonable.

The problem with “reasonable” is that, by definition, it depends upon the average values found in your community, and not on your own values.Is today a day to do something unreasonable? At most times and in most matters, community standards are the best guideline for what to do and what not to do.

This is true both because your community’s standard of reasonableness has successfully evolved and survived, and also because your community will punish you if you deviate from its norms.

That punishment may be severe if the standard is codified in law, or it may be more subtle, such as people avoiding you, but there is always punishment for being different.

The time to move beyond being reasonable is when you have something very important at stake. When your commitment to your purpose, your values, your cause, or your ideas becomes a roaring bonfire within you, stop being reasonable, and do whatever it takes to advance your project.

An issue doesn’t have to be world-changing in order to be worthy of confronting “reasonable” community values.

At the weekend, I watched an amazing comeback in the Heineken Cup final between Leinster and Northampton at the Millennium Stadium with Leinster storming back in the second half to win the cup in scenes reminiscent of Istanbul.

The coach proved to be unreasonable by giving a team talk that did not accept defeat. Sky News reported the next day that the secret of the amazing comeback was the half-time team talk.

When, during a 1962 trip to London, Mandela was offered to lead the struggle from the safety of London, he refused saying, “a leader stays with his people”. How unreasonable! How Innerzela! Go light your candle!

Albert Gumbo is an alumni of the Duke University-UCT US-Southern Africa Centre for Leadership and Public Values. Contact: [email protected]