Have you ever been online shopping and then switched to another site and the clothes you had just been looking at pop up on the sides of the screen? The exact clothes? What you do online is being tracked. It is tracked and filters and it changes the rest of the information that we see. Companies (like Google which tracks what you click on) and sites track your activity and build a sort of profile, an online personality that changes what you see. A filter is created based on the personality that is built for you and it changes what you see.

It is this filter and how it arranges things for someone to see, how it is created from just a small amount of information about you, which is problematic. Yes, it makes life simpler, it’s convenient, you see things that you like. Everything you like is right there at your fingerprints. But on the other hand, you only see the same kinds of things that you’ve looked at before; you don’t get so much new information or new opinions or points of view. Your personality dictates your media, but with that, your media also dictates your personality.

The filter and the personality that is built for you can show you many things that you would want to see, but what if some job opening that you might want to shoot for doesn’t fit with the personality that has been built for you? You might not even see it. What happens when you only get shown articles that support your own opinions and your own point of view? What happens when what you look at online doesn’t reflect who you actually are? Then the filter and the personality can get skewed.

I know that I’ve clicked on more Kardashian links on Facebook than I probably should and now I’ve noticed how they show up more and more. I don’t like the Kardashians, and I can count the number of times I’ve watched their show on one of my hands, but now I’m a person who looks at pictures of their outfits and reads about their plastic surgery. That doesn’t bother me as much as it does to think that someone might not see a job listing because of their online personality filter, one that is created without his or her knowledge and without a true knowledge of their actual personalities.

The moral of the story of the cyber circle is that your personality could get stuck in an everlasting personality loop. The Internet is a land of vast opportunities, and you could discover almost anything, read almost anything, be almost anybody. Except these personality filters change that. We only see the sort of things we have clicked on before, we only see things that the filter thinks we want to see, and our vast, complicated, wild, limitless world becomes smaller and limited and so do our possibilities within that world.

If you want to read more about this, check out "The Filter Bubble" by Eli Pariser.