Are You Just Absorbing Whatever the Algorithm Feeds You? On Attention, Worldview, and Choosing Your Position
Algorithms, social feeds, and ads are picking your worldview for you. This piece looks at the limits of any worldview, how your attention gets stolen, and how to use 'positioning' to actively choose what you consume.
We all live in the same world, but because we go through different things, each of us ends up with our own particular worldview.
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, if you order "laksa," you'll get a bowl of curry noodles (Laksa).
If you go up north to Penang and order "laksa," you'll get a bowl of sour-and-spicy fish noodles with shrimp paste (Asam Laksa).
The two dishes taste nothing alike, but each is the local meaning of the word.
Different experiences make us misread things — without realizing it.
Put another way, our worldview isn't something "we chose"; it's something "pushed to us." Media, social algorithms, and ads decide every day what we see and what we believe. "Going from passive to active" means taking back the steering wheel — actively choosing the content you consume, actively choosing your values, actively positioning your own attention.
This article covers three things: why every worldview has limits, why your attention is being stolen, and how to use "positioning" to choose again.
Why is every worldview destined to be limited?
The world is huge. None of us gets to see it from a god's-eye view.
We can only touch a slice of the world. There are things some of us will never experience in a single lifetime.
Our worldview is just a subset of the world.
From a math perspective, in the finite span of a lifetime:
- The world we can actually touch is finite,
- And the world itself is continuously changing.
But here's the current problem: with tech and the internet, we take in massive amounts of information.
That information shapes our worldview. So ask yourself:
Did I actively go looking for this information?
Why is your attention getting hijacked by algorithms?
The world is doing everything it can to grab your attention — because your attention is worth a lot.
The world we perceive isn't really "the world."
The world we perceive is what media, social algorithms, and ads push to us through deeply human-targeted manipulation.
We can barely resist it, can barely recognize it, can barely validate it.
The information being pushed to us shapes our worldview (or values).
People who grew up with smartphones are especially affected.
The influence isn't only from devices, of course — it's just that we use them way too often.
In everyday life:
- If your first day of college, every classmate is wearing makeup, you'll naturally assume: female college students wear makeup.
- If your first day at a new job, everyone's on a MacBook, you'll feel the urge to switch laptops too(?).
PS: That last one was me. Later I talked my engineer friend into switching from Windows to a MacBook Pro too.
Not long after I moved to Taiwan, I picked up the belief that "if you love your wife, you let her go to a postpartum care center to rest properly."
Later, my wife and my mother-in-law both told me a postpartum center was a must.
My answer? Yes, you're absolutely right (with a straight face).
Lucky for us, neither my wife nor I think a diamond ring is essential. XD
Flip it around: if you searched for wedding rings online today,
I'd bet your Facebook and Instagram will start hammering you with wedding ring ads.
That's why your attention runs short so easily, and why it's so easy to absorb someone else's agenda as your own values.
We can't say those values are "wrong," but they're not what we "actively chose."
Some of these influences are harmless. Some run very deep — especially the ones tied to major life choices.
We need to "go from passive to active" in how we take in information.
What is "positioning"? How do you use it to choose what you actually want to see?
In a previous article, I talked about "positioning your life."
Here's another angle.
Positioning is about your position and orientation in the world.
You look at the world from a specific angle, which means what you see has a boundary.
This positioning is something you actively choose. You set your own direction and focus on it.
People with different positions naturally have different worldviews.
Two people both living in Taiwan can hold completely different values just because they're positioned differently.
The easiest place to see this: which political camp and candidate someone supports.
Another word for this in social media speak: filter bubble.
Hey — maybe "filter bubble" doesn't sound like a great thing.
But if your filter bubble is warm, comfortable, wealthy, and safe — would you still call it bad?
If you're rich, and the people around you are rich, and you all help each other get richer,
would you really think that filter bubble is a problem?
The filter bubbles that are actually bad are the ones with narrow, extreme, prejudiced views.
A good filter bubble is so comfortable you don't want to leave.
Like the creator community I'm in — I learn a lot, and everyone's proactive and upbeat.
Positioning doesn't mean you only look at things in this one direction.
It means you know you belong in this direction, and not in others.
That doesn't mean you don't need to know what's happening elsewhere.
It means avoiding knowing too much that's irrelevant.
Plain and simple: it's about saving (or rescuing) your own attention.
I know Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is great. I read the manga. But I am firmly not watching the anime.
I don't watch movies or shows either. Why?
Because I don't have enough time. The slice of my life I can spend on entertainment is only so big.
If I want to comfortably read manga and play games, I have to give up other entertainment.
Otherwise my downtime starts feeling like a packed travel itinerary, and the leisure disappears.
Sometimes we get hit with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
So we get driven by anxiety to learn and absorb information. The longer you stay in passive-absorb mode, the deeper that anxiety gets.
In an age of information overload, how much do you really need to know to make a choice?
The free flow of information has created a whole new set of social problems.
We've talked about the "attention" arms race. Another one is "value confusion."
Before the information age, you only saw the world inside your own range. Now you see everyone else's worlds.
News, social media, short-form video, TikTok, YouTube — other people's worlds are spilling over the edges.
Those values branch into wildly different perspectives and opinions.
You can see the value clashes on plenty of anonymous sites (Dcard, PTT, etc.):
- Some think hookups are bad; others think only complaining about your sex life after marriage is worse
- Some think a lifetime is too long and you should divorce earlier; others think marriage is supposed to be a long grind of working it out
- Some think earning less is fine as long as you can live; others think life should be vivid or it isn't worth living
There's no right or wrong in these values, but the arguments they trigger drain mental energy.
The more we know, the more we end up wondering: which one's actually right? They both make sense.
The answer: both sides are right. Pick whichever fits you.
Information helps you make choices. But more information doesn't make choosing easier.
More information makes choosing harder, because just figuring out what's true exhausts you.
What you actually need is to trust your own choice. If you're wrong, own it and start over.
If you want to perceive the world correctly, go from passive to active:
- Actively take in information
- Actively choose what you want to see
- Actively choose your values
FAQ
Q: What does "going from passive to active" with information actually mean? A: It means you stop letting algorithms, social feeds, and ads decide what you see. You pick your own sources and define your own focus areas. Three concrete moves: unfollow accounts that make you anxious, lock in a curated information list, and set aside one phone-free block each week.
Q: Are filter bubbles really bad? A: Not necessarily. The bad ones are narrow, extreme, and full of prejudice. If a filter bubble makes you more proactive, teaches you things, and feels comfortable — that's exactly the bubble your "positioning" should be inside.
Q: I'm scared of missing out on information (FOMO). What do I do? A: First, admit you can't know everything — your time is finite, the world is continuously changing. Then pick one or two directions you actually want to go deep on, and let yourself miss the rest. Knowledge you absorbed under anxiety doesn't stick.
Q: How do I tell if my current values are "self-chosen" or "pushed to me"? A: Ask yourself: "When was the last time I actively went looking for material on this view?" If you can't remember, there's a very good chance it was pushed to you.
— Arch Soong