Breaking the Bubble: Exploring How Filter Bubbles Shape Critical Thinking in Community College English Composition
This qualitative case study examines how engagement with digitally mediated environments, filter bubbles, shapes students critical thinking within First-Year Composition (FYC) courses in a community college. Because writing and research now occur in algorithmically curated spaces, understanding their influence on students’ writing practices is essential to composition instruction. While FYC courses tend to emphasize rhetorical awareness, research practices, and critical thinking, technologies are often treated as neutral tools instead of environments that actively shape perspective and access to information. Guided by a conceptual framework that understands writing as socially situated and shaped by technological infrastructures, this study investigates how intentional and structured engagement with filter bubbles influenced students’ writing processes, critical thinking practices, and understandings of digital information systems. Using a qualitative case study approach, informed by digital ethnography, data was collected from two First-Year Composition courses through semi-structured interviews and student writing produced throughout an instructional unit focused on filter bubbles. Findings suggest purposeful disruption and comparison of algorithmically curated content fostered observable shifts in students’ critical thinking and writing practices. Instead of passively encountering personalized information, students engaged in activities such as altering searches, comparing results across users and platforms, and reflecting on variations of information visibility. Through these interactions, students demonstrated increased awareness of how digital systems shape what information is available, engaged more deliberately with source evaluation, and began to position themselves as active participants in navigating their own digital information environments. These findings suggest that integrating guided, inquiry-based engagement within FYC can support the development of more reflective, rhetorically aware, and critically engaged writers. This study contributes to scholarship on digital literacy and composition pedagogy by showing how critical thinking develops through ongoing engagement with digital infrastructures. It provides pedagogical implications for integrating analysis of algorithmically mediated environments into writing instruction in ways that directly align with current FYC outcomes, while better responding to the realities of contemporary digital writing contexts.
Algorithm, Digital, Filter Bubble, Literacy, Social Media, Technology
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