Geographic neighbors fall outside the instrumental filters of algorithmic recommendation.

Evidence

Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities—things we like, things we’ve bought, friends in common—geographical proximity is different, placing us near people we have no “obvious” instrumental reason to care about, who are neither family nor friends (nor, sometimes, even potential friends). I want to propose several reasons we should not only register, but care about and co-inhabit a reality with, the people who live around us being left out of our filter bubbles. And of course, I mean not only social media bubbles, but the filters we create with our own perception and non-perception, involving the kind of attention (or lack thereof) that I’ve described so far. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 458

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Extends ‘filter bubble’ beyond social media to include perceptual selection — a key move for the reader’s defense of Odell’s argument.