Community Contribution 5

I rarely open social media knowing exactly what I want to learn. Sometimes I open YouTube or RedNote for one thing, and twenty minutes later I am watching something completely different because one recommendation led to another. I still made the decision to click on each video, so technically those were my choices. But this course has made me question how much of that process was actually active choice.

Recommendation algorithms are useful because they remove a lot of work. There is more information online than I could ever search through myself, so having a platform narrow it down is convenient. This made me think about Risko and Gilbert’s (2016) concept of cognitive offloading, which explains how people use the external environment to reduce cognitive demands. I think recommendation systems can work in a similar way in my own life. Instead of starting from nothing and deciding what to search for, I can begin with a list of options already selected for me.

What interests me now is that I may be offloading more than the work of searching. I may also be offloading part of the decision about what deserves my attention. When I see the same topic appearing repeatedly on my feed, it can start to feel important, popular, or worth knowing about. But I do not usually see all of the information that was considered and filtered out before those recommendations reached me. I am choosing from what is visible to me, while the platform is partly deciding what becomes visible in the first place.

I think my psychology background makes this especially interesting to me. People naturally use mental shortcuts because we cannot carefully evaluate every decision we make. Online platforms make those shortcuts extremely easy. If a recommendation already fits my interests, clicking it requires much less effort than stopping to ask what else I could be looking at. Over time, my own behaviour also becomes part of the system: I click because something matches my interests, and my click then gives the platform another reason to show me more of the same.

This has changed how I think about being an “active” learner online. I used to think being active mainly meant searching for information myself instead of just receiving it. Now I think it also means noticing how my information environment is being created. I can still use recommendations, but I can also intentionally search outside them, compare information from different places, and sometimes choose something that does not immediately match what I already believe or enjoy.

For me, digital literacy is therefore not about rejecting algorithms. It is about knowing when convenience is helping me and when it might be doing too much of my thinking for me. I am curious whether other people notice this in their own online habits: when you follow a recommendation, do you feel like the platform helped you make a choice, or made part of the choice for you?

Reference

Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002