From Polarization to Prudence

Encounter in an Age of Algorithmic Personalization

Abstract

Algorithmic personalization—the use of algorithms to curate individualizeddigital content based on users’ data, preferences, and behaviors—is increasingly shaping how people engage the world, acquire knowledge, and relate to one another. By fragmenting shared informational spaces and reinforcing existing preferences, algorithmically personalized environments can distort the pursuit of truth, foster polarization, and habituate persons toward self-referential ways of knowing. This paper argues that such environments can therefore be understood as structures of sin that eclipse genuine encounter with others. Drawing on Pope Francis’s call for a “culture of encounter,” the paper proposes that responding to these structures requires the cultivation of virtues that enable persons to know well. It retrieves Thomas Aquinas’ account of prudence, particularly euboulia (good deliberation), and studiositas (the rightly ordered desire for knowledge). These virtues illuminate the dispositions necessary for encountering reality beyond the limits of one’s personalized digital world: euboulia orders deliberation through openness to counsel and the experience of others, while studiositas resists the possessive and superficial knowing characteristic of curiositas. Together, Francis’ culture of encounter and Thomas’ account of virtuous knowing offer an ethical framework for responding to the challenges of algorithmic personalization. Thomas thus provides a medieval contribution to an especially modern problem: learning to encounter reality, and one another, beyond our algorithmically curated worlds.