the little girl could not sleep because her thoughts were way too deep her mind had gone for a stroll and fallen down the rabbit hole I too once fell down a rabbit hole much to my mother's dismay I spent a lot of time on social media scrolling clicking and viewing content that I found interesting it was all a harmless waste of time until a video popped up at the corner of my screen that video was titled do not ever say hello to a feminist a few short laughs and I quickly lost interest I returned to
the homepage of YouTube and noticed that that homepage had starkly changed all of a sudden videos with the term feminism were popping up on my screen and looking back through my history I noticed that videos with the term feminism with a negative connotation associated to them had starkly increased ever since that day the YouTube algorithm had decided that because I clicked on one video with the point of view a negative point of view on feminism that I would click on other videos that were similar and they were right I was intrigued shocked and even perplexed
at how I would I believed would be was a radical movement in its formation my definition of the word feminism was changed and altered by what the YouTube algorithm decided to be this is what propelled me into my rabbit hole this is what propelled me into my echo-chamber that one belief was reinforced and no alternative ideas were being shown as humans we have a fundamental problem with information and that is we just simply can't have it all if you close your eyes could you imagine who's sitting next to you what about who's sitting three seats
away four seats down you see although these people may be in your peripheral vision your mind filters them out because they're not relevant to you retinol at the current moment our senses interact with our mind to filter information to what it deems relevant to us and this has been a problem throughout history therefore as humans we've developed tools to expand this reach of knowledge in prehistory we relied on facial cues body language picked ography in order to understand what other people were thinking however we soon developed language and this reach expanded all of a sudden
your neighbors information could now be your own and your information could now be shared with your neighbor this was then furthered through writing as information can be contained through time with more accuracy however there was a problem with this information is a powerful tool and many sought to restrict it for instance in history the church has limited the Bible to its original language Latin because Latin is the language that not a lot of people understand and if people were to if the people were to understand the Bible and language that they spoke themselves they would
be able to make their own interpretations and formulate their own opinions and therefore question the church journalism and the printing press fertilis the printing press reduced costs of creating books and expanded on who would had access to knowledge journalism allowed people to integrate themselves with their daily news to be aware of situations in their society that they might have otherwise not seen however it was a fundamental problem and that was the lack of sources much of this information was curated controlled by a few select few of people the information was limited however we've come to
a shift the Internet has completely shifted the flow of information and shifted the nature of information itself we've gone from limited to unlimited access of information at our fingertips how we filter this information is problematic there is a lot of what we call chatter which is again the unlimited amount of information available to us online chatter is filtered through algorithms and algorithms have their pros for instance no longer at university professors telling you you can't access the library and no longer our government's telling you what information you can or cannot consume however algorithms do have
a problem and that they are and that is that they are created by humans with bias and that they are often created alongside a business model most internet platforms make their money through your time spent on their platform therefore in order to maximize their profits they have to maximize the time you spend on their platform so the exploit human psychology in order to do this a study done by USC shows that users have a tendency to click on ideas or content that aligns with their belief with this in mind a lot of algorithms are tailored
to keep you in their website by showing you information from one perspective as you're more likely to click on it eeehm cheslow puts this pretty well when he says the goal of the algorithm is really to keep you in line longest unfortunately as the byproduct of this business model information is tailored to each individual person and it fails to challenge your perspective similarly to how my view on feminism went uncontested this is what happens in on platforms of social media this propelled me into my own echo chamber and led me to have a microscopic view
on what I believe feminism however echo chambers are not a new concept they've been used throughout history by authoritarian regimes to maintain their power Hannah Arendt who's a German American philosopher looks at this problem in her book a report on the banality of evil she looks at Adolf Eichmann who was a general under Adolf Hitler whose inability to question the status quo an inability really to look through the perspective of someone else and question their own ideals failed to undermine Hitler and therefore facilitated a genocide however Eichmann is not just a general it's a mentality
people have it's an inability to question what you believe in to reach out of your echo chamber how do we prevent these mentalities from occurring education has always focused on providing us with information that was otherwise limited however a shift has to occur people need to learn how to process how to look for sources and how to question sources people need to learn how to filter and how to question the filters and reflecting back on my time with feminism I look back at the rabbit hole I was in it was really the intellectual diversity around
me the intellectual diversity in this school by my peers my family and my friends that allowed me to question my belief I had access to actual feminists I had access to teachers who had experiences that I had otherwise not known I spoke to different feminists I spoke to my mother whose banker in the female banker in the industry and she discussed the gender pay gap with me I discussed my grandmother who just who revealed the inequality she went through when applying for university as her parents wouldn't pay because she was a woman and I spoke
to him several women in stem with the disproportionate amount of men in the stem field in comparison to women these were all ideas that I have not been aware of and these people really helped me tear down my own echo chamber and although I do admit the Internet is an invaluable resource and by no means I will let it go anytime soon I do have to say it is now a complement to my other sources and I have to question the echo chamber every time I look at information how do we replicate this mentality across
society how do we replicate this how do we help people in smaller communities and in their own echo chambers leave and I am no expert on regulation or how we could help the world solve its problems through help through the change of big business and internet corporations however I do believe that the institutions that provide us information throughout history need to teach us the tools and the processes on how to gather information we each have an individual responsibility to reach out into other people's echo chambers and reach really into our own look ultimately together not
only should we be this friend this questioning friend to others but we should teach society to be this questioning friend to themselves so they too can burn down their own echo chamber thank you [Applause] you
