Human behavior, at a grand level, is often fairly predictable. While you’ll find exceptions for every single rule out there, for the most part, people want to be comfortable. They want a decent place to sleep (for their definition of decent). They want enough to eat (for their definition of enough). They want to feel safe (for their definition of safe). There’s an interesting theory called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that touches on all of this, but what we’re going to focus on here is how people prefer to engage with other people like them. 

There are so many examples to point to of this kind of behavior. Ethnic neighborhoods in cities. University fraternities and sororities. Hobby groups like book clubs or knitting circles. People find comfort in being with people they feel like they understand. They like hearing messages that affirm what they believe. And that’s not always wrong. It’s not always right, either, but right and wrong aren’t the point. The point is, people LOVE this kind of thing. Not just in physical reality, but also in virtual reality. Media companies, advertising services, political parties, lobbyist organizations, they love it, too. They find this basic human tendency to want to be with like-minded people and have like-minded ideas validated absolutely the Best Thing Ever.

In previous posts, we’ve talked at a high level about how tracking happens on the web. And tracking is a part of building information silos. Tracking, however, doesn’t necessarily mean following you as you surf the web. It can also be a single company, following what you choose to see on their own site. The purpose of these platforms is to get you to spend lots of time there. The more time you spend, the more money they make. And they get you to spend time there by showing you what you, comfort-loving human that you are, what you want to see.

It’s not always about money, though. China is probably the most common example of when and how governments can get involved in building information silos. In those cases where censorship is a real and pervasive problem, the information silos are about explicitly controlling behavior by controlling information. 

But let’s get back to the drive of capitalism; government control and censorship is a topic for another time. When we’re talking about Western Culture and capitalism, it all boils down to making money. And keeping you on a single platform means that platform shows you all the advertisements, gets all the subscriptions, and generally makes out like a bandit.

YouTube has been studied quite a bit when it comes to how they tweak their services to show you what you (probably) want to see. Of course, a human isn’t on the other side of your screen, quickly flipping through content and deciding that you, Alice, would really like this cat video. They have a computer figure all that out, and computers make decisions using algorithms. Think of it like a whole lot of “if this, then that” decisions. A digital image is a bunch of dots. Where the dots are located, what colors they represent, all of that can be turned into numbers. Those numbers are then matched to say “this is like that” – that’s how pattern matching works. A computer can get pretty darn good (though not perfect) at matching cats to more cats. A digital image is also more than a bunch of dots. It also has information that says who uploaded the image, how they described the image, when the image was taken, and quite possibly. All that information is fed to the algorithms so it knows what it has to work with.

So, you have a big database of information about content. What other kinds of information can be added to this data soup? Ah, yes! Who has actually looked at the content in the past! Just like an image is more than dots – it’s the wide variety of information about what, when, where, and who uploaded the image – a visitor to the site is more than a single statistic. A visitor quickly builds a profile about themselves, starting with the information of what brought them there. 

I’m pretty sure my first visit to YouTube was to find bird videos for my cats, and to this day, the first thing YouTube shows me when I follow a link back to their platform is another video of birds for cats. In an effort to keep me on the site, there will always be bird videos for cats. And, hey, since I like cats, I will probably like videos about cats, too. I’ll probably also like videos about people who train cats to do tricks. Hours later, I am thoroughly enjoying all things cat, I have a cat on my lap watching the screen with me, and I have suffered through countless pet food commercials.

Which, for me, is pretty harmless. But it isn’t always. There has been some interesting research about how this kind of algorithmic content matching takes people down really ugly rabbit holes. These rabbit holes are extremely disturbing to me, but can be so validating to someone else. I have my silo of liberal, cat-loving people. They have their silo of conservative, end-of-world preppers. And without research, I’ll never have any idea of what kind of information they are hearing over and over and over again, because that’s not going to show up in any of my online content feeds. 

Information silos are good for business. Think about it: why on earth would a content platform want to make you uncomfortable? You won’t ever visit them again! You’re here for entertainment and comfort, not to be constantly challenged by stuff you think is absolutely insane (and not in a good way). 

Information silos are not, however, good for societal empathy. It’s a lot harder to understand the other side of the story if you never see it. And if you’re in a silo, anyone from outside who challenges the information that you’ve already decided makes you happy and comfortable has an uphill battle to get you to change your mind.

It almost sounds like an unwinnable scenario, but at least in this case there are a few easy, actionable things you can do.

• Easy step: Follow a service like Ground.News that explicitly shows a variety of news stories and what political leanings those stories come from. More than once I’ve said “huh. If that’s what the people in that other information silo are reading, no wonder they’re making those bizarre decisions!”

• Less easy step: Regularly watch the news of your least favorite popular news source. I’ll admit, I struggle with this one because it makes me crazy. But it’s very effective in helping understand other viewpoints (even when I vehemently disagree with them).

• Hard step: Go international. If you see a news article on war in some foreign country, go look for how the news is being reported elsewhere. Are you getting the same information in the U.S. that is being shown in France? What’s being reported in the English language version of the newspapers in Malaysia? It’s fascinating what’s considered important outside your silo.

Information silos are absolutely a thing. They are a comfortable thing. They make day-to-day living a lot simpler. They give you what you want. And there’s nothing wrong with that… as long as you realize that a) you are in a silo and b) you really need to leave that silo every once in a while.

Good luck! It’s a big world out there.

Photo by Jim Witkowski on Unsplash