Community Contribution #4 – What does technology bring to our attention, and what does it keep out of view? How might that shape what we learn from our PLN?

ayancharnia

While recently browsing Instagram for football shoes, I never gave much thought to how the app decided which products to push to the top of my feed, seeing it simply as a convenient way to shop. This week’s readings prompted me to reflect more deeply on how technology directs my attention while quietly hiding other choices. Risko and Gilbert (2016) discuss cognitive offloading, which occurs when we rely on external tools to reduce the mental effort required for a task. Instagram makes product discovery effortless through tailored recommendations, but that convenience means the platform heavily shapes my attention. The shoes I saw were often prioritized because of ad spend rather than what best suited my actual needs.

Bucher and Helmond (2018) describe affordances as relational, meaning a platform’s design shapes our online actions and is built to serve advertisers as well as users. As a finance student, I rely on digital tools and news feeds to gather market information and build my PLN. Because these feeds constantly show me more of what I already engage with, they can quietly narrow my perspective. For example, if I interact with posts predicting an economic downturn, the algorithm keeps feeding me similar content while rarely showing the opposing case.

Norman (1983) explains that our mental models of technology are often incomplete. I relate to this because while I know how to navigate these platforms, I do not fully understand how their algorithms decide what to display. Moving forward, my goal is to question these tools and intentionally seek out diverse sources for my network rather than accepting what is handed to me. I am curious to hear from you all: how do you push back against algorithmic curation in your own networks to find diverse perspectives?

References

Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2018). The affordances of social media platforms. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media (pp. 233–253). SAGE Publications.

Norman, D. A. (1983). Some observations on mental models. In D. Gentner & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (pp. 7–14). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002