When Algorithms Decide Whose Voices Will Be Heard

What was the first thing that you did this morning when you woke up? And what was the last thing that you did before you went to bed last night? Chances are that many of us -- probably most of us -- were on our smartphones. Our day-to-day consumption of all things digital is increasingly being analyzed and dictated by algorithms: what we see (or don't see) in our news and social media feeds, the products we buy, the music we listen to. When we type a query into a search engine, the results are determined and ranked by based on what is deemed to be "useful" and "relevant." Serendipity has often been replaced by curated content, with all of us enveloped inside our own personalized bubbles.