In my conversations with people (both online and face-to-face conversations) about the post-election media environment, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my position as a dispassionate optimist. Is this because the world itself is contradicting that position, or is it because I'm being met with more resistance from those around me? That's what I'm still trying to sort out.
Many of the conversations come back to the premise that America is somehow more hostile than it used to be (not just that our leaders are objectionable and/or dangerous, but that the increasing danger resides in our populous). There are also conversations about what particular politicians are doing, will do, or can do, but I want to set those aside for a moment and focus on premises relating to the American population and the extent and intensity of its hostility toward one another. Previously, I've argued that the impression that we're a nation divided is largely an illusion, that the true conflict is mainly at the fringes, but that was before the election. So, I'd like to revisit that argument in light of discussions of public opinion, fake news, and a general sense of threat.
Essentially, my argument was that the strong disagreement we see in our culture is relegated to small groups of individuals on either end of an ideological spectrum that manifests themselves in highly visible ways. Although it can appear as though our entire culture is in a state of unrest (and is getting worse in this respect), this may be an illusion. To paraphrase myself:
This illusion occurs when we mistake uncommon, extreme online behaviors for exemplars. We implicitly or explicitly link hundreds or thousands of people actually stating a belief online (or, in this case, acting hostile toward other Americans online) with the behaviors and beliefs of a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the belief, has stated or acted in such ways that makes it clear that they believe in some of the same things as the group that actually states the belief online. In the U.S. right now, the large groups to which we most often extrapolate are "liberals/Democrats" and "conservatives/Republicans." Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the belief (or actually being openly hostile) online and members of the large group who are not stating the belief (and are not actually being openly hostile online) are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common. This is justified on the grounds that what the small group and the large group have in common is thought to represent a shared, coherent ideological framework (see "Arguing with the Fringes" for further details).
In retrospect, I shouldn't have used the word "fringe" to describe these small groups. The word feels dismissive and judgmental, which is not what I intended. Really, I just want to make a statement about the size of the groups that are in strong disagreement with (and are hostile toward) other Americans. Still, the term "fringe fighting" has a certain ring to it, and I can't think of a suitable alternative word for these groups at the moment, so for the purposes of this post, I'll stick with "fringe."
Arguments/evidence for the Fringe Fighting hypothesis
Though there is more talk about social unrest than there was when I wrote "Arguing with the Fringes," this talk fits a "moral panic" narrative in which people become extremely alarmed over novel behavior that is rapidly becoming popular (often involving media use) and extrapolate to a future world in which the novel behavior radically changes our world for the worse. There are, of course, concerns about rapidly spreading novel behaviors that turn out to be justified, and the dismissal of such concerns as hysterical can have dire consequences. But there are also dire consequences to succumbing to overblown fears, namely rapid declines in interpersonal and institutional trust that are essential to functioning societies, in addition to the "boy who cried 'wolf'" problem (if one's concerns are found by others to be overblown, one loses credibility, forfeiting the ability to call others' attention to future threats). Given the similarities between the talk of social unrest and previous instances of moral panics, it at least seems worthwhile to consider the possibility that concern about Americans' hostility toward one another is a moral panic.
It is also important to ask, "What are we using as indicators of how 320 Million or so Americans think of feel?" How Americans voted and what they say on the internet seem to be commonly used indicators. The majority of Americans did not vote in the last election, so it would be difficult to use 2016 voting behavior to assume anything about how "America" feels about anything. For those who did vote, whom they voted for is a pretty weak signal of any particular belief, as these candidates, in effect, bundle together various disparate beliefs, and some votes are not intended as endorsements of anything the candidate stated or believed but instead are merely "protest votes."
What people say on the internet is also a weak signal of overall public opinion. For one thing, comparatively few people post about politics and social issues (roughly one-third of social media users, according to Pew). And many of those are posting information that is visible only to those in their immediate social circles (e.g., posting on Facebook). Such information is highly salient to individuals consciously or unconsciously forming beliefs about what other Americans believe, but it is hardly representative of Americans as a whole.
We may also question assumptions about the impact the hostility we're able to see is having. The extreme voices may have been largely filtered out because most of their friends unfollowed or hid them. The only people who don't filter out the extreme voices are the ones who already would have believed whatever the poster is trying to convince them of. What good is sharing a news story if very few people follow you, and those few people already knew about the news you're sharing? As a side note, it would be nice to have some information about actual audience and the practice of unfollowing to go along with the information about sharing and 'liking' information online.
Better evidence about what America, as a whole, believes can be found in the General Social Survey, which attempts to look at what ALL Americans believe rather than the few that contribute content to the internet. Data from the survey suggests that American public opinion on a variety of social issues is relatively stable over the past few decades; an abrupt shift in that, though not impossible, would seem unlikely.
Finally, there is evidence that the growth of political animosity in the U.S. is a trend that pre-dates social media, so perhaps social media is just making visible what was already there. It should be noted that animosity (and attitude) is not the same thing as hostility (a behavior).
Arguments/evidence against the Fringe Fighting hypothesis
There is some evidence of growing distrust of the media. If you're not getting your information from the media (or whatever you define "mainstream media" as), where are you getting it from? You could either get it directly from alternative news sources or get it via social media, which carries stories from those alternative news sources. Many existing measures of exposure to news have yet to catch up with the way we consume news. It is entirely possible, given the growing distrust in mass/mainstream media and the lack of good indicators about where Americans get their information, that Americans have quickly shifted toward consuming news stories that frame current events chielfy in terms of conflict between groups of Americans.
What does this have to do with hostility? Well, those intra-American-conflict news stories could play to whatever various groups are inclined to believe about various other groups, play to one's fears (climate change on the Left; undesirable social change on the Right; an unfair, "rigged" economy and government on both the Left and Right), decrease trust and empathy, increase fear and cynicism, and sew dissent. Very few people may be initially fighting with one another, but if those people can disseminate information so as to convince disinterested others that the people on the Other Side of the fight are a growing threat to everyone, they can effectively "enlist" those disinterested others in the fight. What starts as a fringe fight could quickly grow into something larger.
So What?
For a moment, let's assume that there is a problem, that a significant number of people in America disagree with one another to a significant degree. Is this necessarily bad? Disagreement isn't bad in and of itself; arguably, it's desirable so as to avoid the pitfalls of "groupthink." But strong disagreement could lead to incivility (which, some would say, is antithetical to empathy and compromise, and compromise seems like a prerequisite to having a functioning democracy and economy) and censorship (which is antithetical to democracy and the progress of science and education). Incivility could lead to violent attacks (though I've heard at least one scholar argue that arguments can be uncivil and not be bad in these senses). In so far as we see evidence of strong disagreement growing and/or leading to incivility, censorship, and violent attacks, then yes, it's bad.
Assuming we have a problem, what do we do about it? It's possible that the traditional channels by which we sought to address social unrest would no longer work within a decentralized, non-hierarchical information system like today's (or tomorrow's) internet. This is the "everyone finds their own facts" problem (a topic for an upcoming blog entry). Even if you engage in a dispassionate analysis of evidence and find support for the fringe fighting hypothesis, or evidence that people are consuming more and more biased information and wandering further from any objective truth, what are you going to do with that information? You might teach it in a class, but if people don't want to hear it, then people might just start distrusting teachers more. You might publish in an academic journal, but what good is that when the journal loses it's sense of authority and credibility? If you publish in that academic journal and your research is covered by The New York Times, what good is that if fewer and fewer people trust The New York Times?
I'm left with a desire (quixotic as it may be) to try to step outside the problem. I know that many are fond of casting Intra-American conflict (online and offline) as a part of global phenomenon, but here again, I think we're making a facile analogy, choosing to see the similarities and ignoring the many differences. Surely, not every country is experiencing precisely the same kind of online conflict problem that Americans are experiencing. I was reminded of this point while attending this year's Association of Internet Researchers annual conference in Berlin, where I was fortunate enough to present on a panel with researchers from Israel, Denmark, and the U.K. I was left with the notion that not all online discussion forums are the same with regard to conflict, that intra-group conflict is not inevitable in the digital era.
We might also step outside of the internet for a moment. Anecdotally, I've observed a few folks taking a break from social media and news media because the emotional pitch of online discourse became so shrill as to be unbearable. I'm reminded of an idea put forth in Joshua Rothman's book review in the New Yorker (as well as the book he was reviewing, I assume) that our face-to-face interactions with individuals and our feelings about the political groups to which those individuals belong are often in conflict. Short version: we love (or at least tolerate) our neighbors but we hate the political groups to which they belong. The basic idea is that it is harder to hate a person in person. It will be important to see how our face-to-face interactions at work, school, family, and in public places progresses along side our perceptions of behavior online.
So, where to go from here? For starters, it seems worthwhile to examine the framing of news about current events: do we really see an uptick in exposure to intra-American conflict framing, or are our filter bubbles fooling us into think this? It's also important to understand more about the contexts in which online hostility occurs (a goal of my current research project examining hostile behavior on Reddit) and when and where this is associated with offline hostility.
1 comment:
nice post, thanks
vana
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