From the American Suburb to Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles. How Urban Evolution Has Shaped the Platform Society
Abstract
The concepts of filter bubble and echo chamber are two of the most disturbing drifts on the future of digital societies that communication research has offered in the last ten years. They are two online closed spaces: the first is the result of the filtering logics introduced by the affordances of the platforms that govern communication exchanges on the web and is regulated mainly by algorithms; the second derives from the desire to reduce cognitive dissonance through “self-enclosure” in digital environments where only the same opinions and points of view are repeated.
By comparing the urban sociology of the 1980s and 1990s, and the most recent theories produced in the field of Internet studies, this article aims to demonstrate that the platform society in which we live today – and its most dystopian drifts – had already been anticipated and prepared by the urban reconfiguration that took place, especially in the United States starting from the 1950s, with the housing form of Suburbia. The American suburb was born as a desire of a slice of the population to shut themselves up in homogeneous and controlled spaces (echo chambers) but it is also the result of political, urban, economic, and technological algorithms aimed at profiling and classifying the urban population (filter bubbles), thus defusing the conflictual potential of the anonymous metropolitan crowd.
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