# Filter and label your email

The average office worker is [estimated](https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05/shocking-truth-about-how-many-emails-sent/) to receive 121 emails per day (Campaign Monitor, 2019). Let's then assume that said person is awake and working (to some extent) for 12 hours each day. If that person checked their email every hour, they would have to check around 10 new emails per hour. Now let's say that person spends an average of 2 minutes on each email. That's 242 minutes, which is almost 4 hours spent checking emails alone! That's a third of the day *gone*, and my math doesn't even account for any time spent actually responding to emails. Now, who has that kind of time? Frankly, no one, which is why having an email filtering system to help you sort through all those messages can be helpful. Kind of like the one I have created here to keep my class emails all in one spot where I can easily sort through them!


Now my Communications in the Digital Age class has its own label where all messages will bypass my inbox and end up in their own dedicated folder that I can check as needed. Thanks filter!


But not all filters are quite so helpful as this one. In fact, there are some filters that don't have our best interests in mind, and that we might not even be aware we're in. These are called "Filter Bubbles."

Much like we can filter our emails by subjects, words, and senders, social media can filter us by interests, friends, and clicks. This is our "filter bubble," which Parisner (2015) defines as "the personalized universe of information that makes it into our feed" (p. 1). This kind of filter funnels information to us that is already within our realm of interest, ensuring that we are not met with any cognitive dissonance. As Valenza (2016) noted cognitive dissonance is a feeling people tend to want to avoid, causing them to search for information that confirms their already held beliefs, much like the young girl did in boyd's 2017 article "Did Media Literacy Backfire?" Thus, we are funneled further into an echo chamber, only seeing news that conforms to our previously held beliefs, never learning or expanding our horizons. But can we fully blame social media platforms like Facebook for this? Or are we just as responsible?

Farnam Street (2017) states that filter bubbles are "something we can only opt out of, not something we consent to" (p. 12). I disagree with this statement. By virtue of using social media, we are consenting to having our information cultivated, filtered, and used to target us. Claiming that you are not aware that this is going on is simply not a valid excuse anymore, and social media companies are not trying to hide it.

We are quick to blame social media for putting us into "reputation silos" (Gladstone, 2011, p. 5), but we are not quick to look at ourselves as active participants. But we are. In Gladstone's (2016) podcast, Ethan Zuckerman makes the statement: "I think the personalization that we all do every day by choosing what information we look for, choosing who we talk to and who we interact with is a much more powerful force in limiting our exposure to different forms of information." (p.9). This statement I agree with because, in the end, we have to first give social media information in order for them to create a filter, the same way we must enter information before we create a specific email filter. The less variety in the information we ourselves seek, the less variety social media platforms will feed us. Social media is a feedback loop, and this is something we need to be consciously aware of. After all, it is not the job of Facebook to broaden our horizons. That is our job.

We can search for different perspectives. We can friend people with different political views. We can educate ourselves on new, perhaps even dissonant topics.

We can pop the filter bubble.