The Two Webs

There are two dialogs on human behavior (which includes political, economic, and social behavior) taking place on the web. In effect, there are two webs.

One web consists of data on human behavior and commentary about this data. This one connects some folks in academia to folks in policy circles and the private sector around the world. This is Big Data.

The advantages of this mode of inquiry is that it harnesses the power of new media technologies to provide more information to help improve our predictive power when trying to understand something as enormously complex as individual and collective human behavior. Many of the critiques of quantitative study of human behavior were grounded in the fact that studies simply didn't have enough information to predict and explain the variance in behavior. Whereas other sciences (physics, chemistry) had enough information about a system to predict outcomes within that system, social sciences did not. But if we were to assume, for a moment, that a team of researchers had access to every single bit of information about every human thought, feeling, or behavior for thousands of years, then that team's ability to predict human behavior would be comparable, I think, to those in other sciences. With better predictions come better answers to questions: how best to minimize suffering, or the spread of disease, or human's impact on the environment, or whatever.

Of course, this mode of inquiry is not without its flaws (or at least perceived flaws). The collection and analysis of so much data on human behavior is viewed as being exploitative in some way: those collecting the information benefit and those who are the subjects do not. There are privacy issues: privacy is seen as a prerequisite to mental and emotional health as well as a means of maintaining some power over determining the course of your life (the actual value of privacy would be difficult to determine within this purely quantified conversation about human behavior). There is also the fear that someone with enough information about human behavior will be able to manipulate people to suit their ends (but if those collecting and analyzing data discuss findings freely and don't hoard secrets, this critique doesn't make much sense to me). It can easily be abused by people thinking there's a causal relationship when then there is only a correlational one. Statistics, when misused, create the illusion of certainty. Statistics could always be misused, but the more powerful and widespread they become, the more likely misuse might be and the damage that could be done.

You might call this the rational web. It views behaviors and events as probablistic (or it should, anyway) and it takes into account the degree to which outcomes are affected. If, say, it was determined that people's political party identification determined the amount they were paid when controlling for occupation, abilities, etc., you could find an answer to the question of how much difference it made in terms of pay (maybe Republicans make $4000 more on average when controlling for other relevant variables). In fact, there is an expectation that you answer the "how much" question.

The other web consists of rhetoric: emotional appeals to pre-existing, deeply held beliefs about human behavior. The most commonly used technique here is to select a few emotionally charged stories and try to get the audience to empathize with them. As access to the web has increased, it has become easier to find a subject (that is, the individual at the center of the story) whose situation exemplifies the pre-existing beliefs about human behavior held by the author of the story and the intended audience. Its easier to find the emotionally charged stories, the one or 3 or 100 personal stories that, when you look at parts of them the right way, support your pre-existing belief that, say, capitalism or socialism is harmful or that a certain policy does more harm than good. This technique connects some other folks in academia with the public at large, particularly disenfranchise members of the public worldwide.

Here, I think one possible danger of the wide-spread use of this technique might be that the echo chamber effect (where certain factions become less able to take the perspective of others and become more hostile towards others) gets stronger. Confirmation bias runs amok, and fewer people take into account new information in order to make better decisions. Any holder of an opinion, no matter how wacky, can find others supporting their opinion. This social support, this sense that one is not alone in one's beliefs, is essential to the persistence or propagation of an idea or ideology. Even if one is in the minority, all one has to do is draw an analogy to a group that was in the minority that eventually became the majority (the rebelling colonists in early America or civil rights crusaders in the later 1950's) in order to justify one's beliefs.

You might call this the emotional web. Rather than being probablistic, it is principled. It rarely asks the question "how racist is a statement?" or "how much privacy is being sacrificed?" or "how much freedom is the right amount of freedom"? In this way, it seems irreconcilable with the rational web.

You can't easily categorize certain websites as one or the other. Two of my favorite news sites - the New York Times and Slate - have some stories that appeal to statistics and analyses of statistics and other stories (usually editorials) that appeal to emotion by cherry-picking individual stories. In fact, a journalistic standard seems to be to combine the two: start with an individual's story and then zoom out to the larger trend. Hook the audience with emotion and convince their inner skeptic with data.

Still, I can see, at the very least, certain blogs that are more emotional or more rational, and it would be interesting to see if certain people gravitated toward either emotional/rhetoric arguments or rational/data-driven ones. Last month, I saw a great paper at the International Communication Association's annual conference by Brian Weeks titled "Partisan enclaves or diverse repertoires? A network approach to the political media environment" that suggested that the self-selection ideological bias (dems watch only MSNBC, repubs watch only Fox News) is a misconception and that personal media repertoires are more diverse, at least ideologically, than many believe. They may be diverse (or rather, balanced) in terms of their emotional or rational content as well. But maybe they are not, in which case we really are two different groups of people having two fundamentally different conversations about human behavior. Definitely an avenue worth exploring.

The Politics and Psychology of Academic Language

The most lively panel I attended at this year's ICA conference was the "Keywords: Effects" panel. 4 panelists were, in their own ways, demanding that we move beyond "effects," or, to put it another way, were proclaiming the death of effects research. One problem with effects researchers: they proclaim to study actual real-world violence when they actually study people's tendencies to administer sound blasts to other people in a lab setting. Another problem is that effects studies only measure an effect at a set point in time when it is likely that true media effects take place gradually and constantly over time (so it would be better to call them "processes" than "effects"). Afterward, Ron Tamborini had a great comment, basically saying that the argument over effects research was a semantic one, and that proclaiming that "effects research is dead" is just a good way of scaring those new to the field that what they're doing is worthless. His comment garnered applause from some members of the audience, and I have to say that I agreed with what he was saying.

I've read and seen more disputes similar to this one. Basically, they take this form: one group of researchers does some research with obvious, acknowledged limitations. Despite the limitations, the research moves us beyond what we used to know about that phenomenon. They select a word for their work. Time passes and methods improve. Another group of researchers comes along and pokes holes in the work of the first group of researchers. At this point, two things can happen. The first group of researchers can take heed of the criticism and modify their methods while retaining the original term they used for the phenomenon or their study of that phenomenon OR the second group of researchers can come up with a new name, decry the old names for the old methods/constructs to be obsolete, and move the field forward.

Note that in both cases, the actual research, the actual methods and the actual bits of information that we know about a phenomenon are exactly the same. The debate is not over what we know, but over how much and in what ways language shapes our ideas of what we know. For decades, we've known that language matters, that word choice constricts and opens up ways of thinking. But this valuable observation has been used in only one way: to point out the ways in which existing power structures foreclose the possibility of new meanings. Unfortunately, it has not been applied to an equally common and equally problematic use of language: the invention of new words and terms to further one's career or to aid the progress of one's in-group. The side effects of this political use of language are that we get bogged down in semantic debates and the growth of our collective, public knowledge of actual phenomena is retarded (while smaller groups in the private sector accumulate vast amounts of knowledge about people). Though the intentions may be good and the observation that "language determines and is determined by power structures" is a valuable one, those making this observation have released a cacophany of go-nowhere neologisms that sell a few books and then are lost to academic linguistic history.

What I see too often is the construction of straw men by up-and-coming researchers who, instead of helping to build knowledge for all, make careers for themselves (nevermind whether they intend to do this; their motives don't determine the outcome). In order to do this, they deny the possibility (indeed in many cases, as with "effects research," the plain reality) that researchers working within the existing paradigm can modify their methods to accomodate things we've learned about the phenomenon or new tools we have for studying the phenomenon. Effects researchers have acknowledged the weak construct validity of earlier studies and have adapted accordingly. They've tested various outcome variables at various points in time, developing data on trends rather than static outcomes. They've changed their ways. Do they need to change their name? To what end?

Along with "effects," the words "rational" and "cognitive" were hotly contested words at ICA this year. The debate over whether people are "rational decision makers" fits this pattern. Just because people decide, at a certain moment, to weigh the importance of one thing (be it their marital bliss, their libidos, their faith in God or community or justice) and just because they had certain restrictions on the information available to them doesn't mean that their brains worked in a fundamentally different way than they would if they had more information or valued different things at that given moment. To say that people are "rational" or "irrational" decision makers (or "cognitive" or "emotional" decision makers), to me, implies that people's brains work in fundamentally different ways, which is not the case. The circumstances under which decisions are made change, but the mind still works the same way: take in information, consider how it changes our belief that an action will help bring about a state we desire at that moment, and act accordingly. This applies to every human action I can think of, no matter how supposedly "irrational" it is. Yes, I'll acknowledge that different parts of the brain are activated when making certain kinds of decisions (what we might refer to as "emotional" decisions), but I think that the brain is still taking in information and acting based on a desire. The word "irrational" implies that its either random or totally at the whim of some other guiding force. In reality, the thinking is just based on different temporary priorities and limited amounts of information. There is also confusion over whether "rationality" assumes that we are deliberate in our actions. Again, I don't think that it means that. We can be rational even if we make rational decisions on an unconscious level.

Ann Gray's preference for the words "research material" in lieu of "data" provides another example. She claims that " 'data' has strong associations with 'evidence', 'information' and 'proof' as well as being associated with the products of more conventional sociological research methods." Its hard to deny this, and yet won't using the term "research material" confuse a lot of people? Those words already are loaded with their own meanings for every reader. How do you weigh the consequences of your word choice: causing confusion vs. freeing us from the restrictive nature of old paradigms?

In the giddiness of having seen the connections between language choice and power, we've gotten bogged down in debates over words, overestimating the power of an academic to alter language and misunderstanding the ways in which languages actually evolve over time (I have the feeling that language interventions are destined to fail, though I'd welcome any evidence that suggests otherwise). These debates serve to turn off anyone outside of a small number of in-group academics (as Tamborini noted, they even turn off and confuse undergrads and grad students) and, again, allow other people in other fields to advance knowledge of the world while we quibble over what words to use.

There have been some failures of those actively seeking to change language for political/ideological reasons, as well as some successes. Why do some words fail to catch on? I would argue that even if a word is loaded with meaning that hinders the population who must use it, the change in language will only take if the substitute is clear and concise enough.

Who uses the word matters (Wanda Sykes PSA for not using the word "gay"). If a more and more diverse set of people use a word or stop using a word, the word will have more/less of a stigma, or will gradually stop being perceived as a grammar rule that P.C. academics are trying to force us to adopt.

In the end, the internet has taught us that language spreads like a virus (though its hard to say how long some of the neologisms will be with us). Language is important and it affects how we behave and think, but changing it is quite difficult. It seems that you cannot change it simply by presenting evidence that a word is somehow discriminatory. If you really want people to use your new word, or to stop saying "faggot" or "nigga," I think you can't just lecture people or point out that powerful people dictate language. There has to be a more nuanced understanding of the spread of words throughout a population. I don't study linguistics, so for all I know, there is such an understanding. I'd be interested to learn what it is.