Personalized Bubbles and Perceived Reality

Algorithms create personalized digital bubbles that reinforce users’ existing beliefs, making their feeds feel like accurate reflections of the world while subtly shaping their behavior.

10/16/20251 min read

In the end, algorithms wrap up their impact on identity by crafting a custom digital bubble for each person. Shoshana Zuboff describes how these platforms dig into user data to forecast and influence actions. This fuels markets built around those predictions (Zuboff 2019). Everyone's feed feels tailored, like the whole web revolves around them alone. It just reinforces what they already think and like. They start treating that feed as a true mirror of the world.