Double Bubble Trouble

Social media has you captured in a bubble - but what if it changes?

Photo by Kai Dahms on Unsplash

Time is a thief.

You cannot trust that anything lasts, not even your self-created refuge on social media, your bubble.

Much has been said about these social media filter bubbles that allow you to see only a fraction of the world but make you believe that you see it all.

You create them by selecting people to follow, posts you like, and by commenting, viewing, and searching.

Everything you do helps shape your personal bubble. And there, you can feel safe, knowing that you will be exposed mostly to such contents that you like.

But what if you someday wake up and discover that your bubble is different? That nothing is as you remember it, the bubble you are now in is someone else’s or a fake bubble that has captured and kidnapped you, now showing you an unrecognizable world.

A first, unknown bubble

When we were young, on the Internet, we didn’t know about bubbles. Maybe they had not been invented, who knows? We thought that a search on a search engine, when they appeared, would show us results from all over the Internet.

When chat-apps started appearing, along with emails getting widespread, we believed that we were in touch with the world.

When social media were invented, the first, weak attempts of them, such as MySpace, Friendster, and Ecademy, we genuinely believed that we had cracked the code to becoming a global village — everybody now being able to meet each other, learn from each other, and help each other.

We were excited about the new opportunities and looked forward to having access to the world and all of its people and information.

What perspectives we could see! Information at your fingertips, a digital revolution.

The sudden appearance of bubbles

It became too much. All that information led to information overload.

At the same time, several clever people and organizations could see a purpose in not telling it all, keeping you in a partial information vacuum. you would get lots of information, but not equally much of it all.

LinkedIn was first out, I think. Based on the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation”, and a trend in network-building, seeing people trying to draw maps of their networks and maintaining these by regularly contacting key nodes in the network map.

Six Degrees of Separation was such an idea, actually an old one but with some renewed attention in the 1990s, that you are actually connected to every single person in the world through at most six other people. So, your contact has a contact, who has a contact, and so on — at most six of them will be needed for mapping your connection with anyone, even Santa Claus or The Wizard of Oz, I suppose.

But the people behind LinkedIn were clever — they allowed you to see only three levels of connections, thereby creating a bubble around you. You simply could not know about the existence of anyone outside your three-level bubble.

And everybody else followed troop. You became isolated, without even knowing it. I can tell, because people kept talking about the global village long after they had lost free sight of it.

Google took over the search world and started isolating you there as well, providing a paid picture of the world as advertisers wanted you to see it.

The world became a construction.

The first bubble is the deepest

I joined LinkedIn in 2006, as far as I remember, expanding my newly found bubble by understanding how connecting to people around the world made me see a growing part of the world around me.

It took a while from there before anyone started talking about bubbles, and it was not until maybe ten years later that some people started talking about the phenomenon as a problem.

The problem consists of everybody around you apparently having the same opinions, same view on the world as you, simply because you, knowingly or unknowingly, have sorted people according to their way of thinking. And that all makes you believe that the world agrees with you.

Facebook and Twitter in particular became exponents of this problem. There could be extreme and wild discussion wars going on about current topics, such as migration or various conflicts of the world. And everybody participating believed that they represented the majority in their point of view, since all the people they were connected to seemed to think likewise. Those monkeys from another tribe who dared to claim something else were by definition wrong and in the minority.

My LinkedIn bubble and its side-bubbles and extensions on other social media were, as I believed it, representing my choice of friends and influencers, my kind of news. And only gradually, I understood how the bubble was limiting me, stealing my understanding of the world as it is and replacing that with a skewed and fake view on many things.

Same as the advertising world does, actually, but totally embracing, impossible to find your way out of.

But it was my bubble, I thought, and even though it became more and more absurd, so that I decided to quit Facebook and Twitter, trying to get news and opinions of people from all over the world in more neutral ways, from outside that bubble, I did stick with LinkedIn, because it had become kind an address book and the replacement of the now vanished phone books. If I wanted to talk to an old colleague — or find a new one — where else could I go?

Waking up

Then it happened, not long ago.

Looking at the stream of information, the feed, the list of notifications — the people who somehow informed me or contacted me — I suddenly realized that they were just about all people who had joined LinkedIn within the last year or so.

My thousands of old connections were completely silent. I saw and heard only the new ones.

I think that there are very many science fiction stories of that type, where someone wakes up, only to see that the world around them is different from the one they remember from when they went to bed. People are no longer the same, and the awakening person starts wondering what happened and if they themselves are the same. Maybe the “knowledge” of the past was just a dream, maybe they have somehow made it all up and that remembered world never existed in reality?

And that was how I felt. Suddenly, I discovered that my bubble had been replaced with a different one.

The second bubble is only a surface

As I am now navigating this new and strange bubble, trying to get acquainted with its inhabitants and their behaviour, I realize that it is all superficial. Like an AI-generated image of a world that doesn’t really exist and with people who, if you look closely, have weird fingers and three legs.

The behaviour is nothing like the good old “do you remember when our boss did that silly thing, and we were all laughing?”

No, now people say the equivalent of “the others are all idiots who just want to catch your attention to sell you something, but I am the real deal, having the only course, newsletter, coaching, whatever, that really is worth something.” This, mixed with posts about how things are, often with an illustration showing that there really are just five things to consider when looking for a job, for instance.

It is all very superficial, competitive, and meaningless. It is nothing but the surface of a bubble, not even a real, filled-out bubble as my old one.

But a bubble it is, and it does limit my view of the world, letting me stay in the unknown about how many people are there, how many thoughts and needs, how many practical developments and improvements, what philosophies have been developed, which trees have been planted.

I wonder what happened to my old bubble. Is it still out there, in the universe, or did it cease to exist at the moment I woke up in the new one?

Or did it actually never exist in reality, was it just a dream, after all?