Types of audience fragmentation

 I'm embarking on a new large-scale project relating to audience fragmentation. Or rather, I have been embarking on it for the past year - such is the leisurely pace of the post-tenure research agenda. It started as a refutation of the echo chamber as an intuitive but overly simplistic characterization of audiences' media diets in the age of information abundance. Then I realized that someone already wrote that book. 

In researching the idea, I was surprised to find how few studies about fragmenting audiences and echo chambers even tried to capture what I felt was the right kind of data: data capturing the whole of people's media diets - not aggregate audience data, not what individual users post on a particular platform, not even the amount of time or what individuals see on a particular platform, but ALL of what they see across all platforms and media. Unless you capture that, you really have no way of knowing whether individuals have any overlap with one another in what content they consume and/or how many of them are sequestering themselves in ideologically polarized echo chambers. 

In defense of researchers, this is a hard kind of data to get. What media content people consume is often a private matter. It's just hard - for an academic researcher, a company, a government - to get people to trust them enough to get that data. Observing people might cause them to change their behavior. Still, some researchers have made in-roads - working with representative samples, trying to get precise, granular data on precisely what content people are seeing - and I think that if we start to piece together what they have gathered and supplement it with new data, we'll be able to get a better sense of what audience fragmentation actually looks like. 

I've started the process of collecting that data. In a survey, I've asked a sample of college students to post URLs of the last 10 TikTok videos they watched, the last 10 YouTube videos they watched, and the last 10 streaming or TV shows they watched. I'm anticipating that there will be more overlap in the TV data than in the YouTube of TikTok data. But I wonder what counts as meaningful when it comes to overlap or fragmentation. I return to the age-old question: so what?

Let's say you have a group of 100 people. In one scenario, 50 of them watch NFL highlight videos, 25 watch far-right propaganda videos, and 25 watch far-left propaganda videos. In another scenario, all 100 of them watch 100 different videos about knitting. The latter audience, as a whole, is more fragmented than the former audience. The former is more polarized in terms of the content it consumes - half of the sample can be said to occupy echo chambers, either on the right or left. 

It's clear to me while the polarization of media diets matters - it likely drives political violence, instability, etc. But why does fragmentation, in and of itself, matter? 

I guess one fear is that we will no longer have any common experiences, and that will make it harder to feel like we all live in the same society - not as bad as being ideologically polarized, but it's plausible to think that it might lead to a lack of empathy or understanding. But what counts as a common experience? Do we have to have consumed the same media text? Stuart Hall would tell you, in case you didn't already know, that different people watching the same TV episode can process it in different ways, leading to different outcomes. But at least there would be some common ground or experience. 

But what if we watched the same genre of television show, or watched the same type of video (e.g., videos about knitting)? If we contrast the 100 people who all watched different knitting videos to 100 people who all watched videos about 100 very different topics (e.g., knitting, fistfights, European history, coding, basketball highlights, lifestyle porn, etc.), I would think that the former group would have more to talk about - more common ground and experience - than the latter, despite the fact that there is an equal amount of overlap (which is to say, no overlap) in terms of each discrete video they watched. 

Instead of just looking at fragmentation across discrete texts, it would also be useful to look at it across genres or types. It could get tricky determining what qualifies as a meaningful genre or TikTok video. Some TikTok videos share a set of aesthetic conventions but may not convey the same set of values, or vice versa. There will be some similarities across the texts in people's media diets, even if there is no overlap in the discrete texts. The challenge now is to decide what similarities are meaningful. 

‘The Curdling of the Internet’: The Open Public Sphere Internet as Threat Amplifier

A weekend retreat to a cabin in the woods provided me with time to finally get around to reading Jia Tolentino’s essay, ‘The I in the Internet.’ In a way, I’ve been thinking about what Tolentino describes as the ‘curdling’ of the internet for the past two years, since our research team started reviewing research on various forms of online hostility. More broadly, I’ve been thinking about the effects of social media on societies for the past decade.

I’m generally opposed to sweeping pronouncements about the negative effects of the internet, smartphones, or social media, mostly because it doesn’t seem to fit the evidence. Social media use, by itself, doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on well-being or depression; that is, if one person spends three hours a day on social media and the other spends one hour, or no hours, the person who uses more social media is no more likely to feel bad about themselves or about life in general. There’s also evidence that the internet exposes users to a wider range of opinions, rather than sorting users into filter bubbles or extreme echo chambers. Bad things may be happening in today’s world, and social media use might have increased at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that one caused the other to occur.

And yet, despite the apparent lack of evidence of a strong, negative effect of social media use on individuals, I can’t help but wonder if we, as researchers, are missing something, and how we might adjust so as to capture those things.

One way Tolentino’s feeling and the lack of individual, direct effects on social media users can both be true is if the internet/smartphones/social media are having a profoundly negative effect on society in general, but it occurs in some kind of indirect way. The most concise way of describing my hunch about this would be the ‘threat amplification’ effect. These technologies amplify certain voices, making certain kinds of people and behavior that were formerly invisible more visible. A sub-set of highly active social media users see the platforms as battlefields on which an ideological war is being fought, and so they post information that furthers their agendas, and/or a subset of especially passionate people simply express how strongly they feel about some issue. These expressions are perceived as threatening by a sub-set of other users, not necessarily because they contain explicit threats of violence, but maybe because they clash with some fundamental belief of theirs, or portend an escalation in the encroachment on their rights (e.g., the right to free speech; the right to exist; the right to defend themselves). These posts stick out to many people, draw attention to themselves in the way that any perceived threat in our environment sticks out to us. If future visibility of posts is determined through the amount of attention paid to them (via algorithms or 'most read' lists, etc.), then we tend to see more and more of these types of posts as time goes on.

Also, well-meaning users (journalists, re-tweeters, etc.) draw further attention to these posts in an effort to make sure that others see the threat because to ignore the threat would be hazardous. They might do so out of a sense of duty and compassion to others (i.e., they see others are in danger from the threat and must warn them) but might also do so out of self-interest, or in-group-interest. By drawing otherwise apathetic individuals’ attention to the threat, they may enlist them to join their fight. In such a way, much of the online discourse comes to resemble either a threat or a response to a threat.  

If we react to this by leaving the internet, by not participating, this may preserve our piece of mind, but it cedes the public forum of the internet to those holding more extreme views. So, perhaps we try to meet the threat with an equal and opposite assertion of our beliefs or values (which may, of course, be viewed by others as extreme and threatening). Or perhaps we just conform to the now-established norm of value-assertion-through-strong-takes in order to be heard (because in order to gain greater visibility in the form of likes, shares, and subscribers, it helps to conform to norms of what is popular), or simply because humans are prone to unconsciously conform to social norms of expression. All of these would lead to an internet that actually is becoming more threatening (again, defining 'threats' not in terms of what was intended, but how they are perceived by someone), and exposure to it would likely lead to increased polarization, depression, abuse, harassment, toxicity, etc. The internet may not have started out that way, but it could be the case that it is becoming that.

And that’s the tricky part. The internet that Robert Kraut analyzed 20 years ago in his landmark study of the effects of internet use had certain kinds of content and certain kinds of experiences and perspectives posted by users, and the internet that the research summed up in Hancock et al. has other content/experiences/perspectives, and today’s/tomorrows internet has/will have other content/experiences/perspectives. And if those three stages of the internet are sufficiently different from one another in terms of their contents, they may have very different effects. Thus, though we haven’t observed strong negative consequences of social media use, it’s impossible to rule out them occurring in the future, or right now, given the publishing lag and, perhaps, that we're looking at the wrong outcome variables.

The negative effects of internet use may not be depression, narcissism, or physical aggression. They may manifest themselves in voting behavior (e.g., voting for increasingly partisan, extreme candidates, so as to counter the perceived threat from the other side), or some other behavior that reflects a distrust in others (e.g., unwillingness to live in certain places or send one’s kids to schools with certain types of people, a kind of self-segregation). Eventually, this kind of mutual distrust may manifest itself in physical violence. Or perhaps we’ll view one another as very, very different and threatening, but ultimately leave one another alone, co-existing peacefully if not without mutual resentment (stranger things have happened).

But here’s an important limitation: everything I’ve called ‘the internet’ up until this point really refers to part of the internet: the open ‘public sphere’ internet: Twitter, Reddit, comments sections on news websites, the part of YouTube in which YouTubers engage in a kind of running commentary about the world; maybe certain users on Facebook and Instagram who use those platforms in this way. Tolentino does note that she's mostly talking about the 'social internet.' This is the part of the internet in which a single individual can post something that reaches many other individuals (one-to-many). But many of Tolentino's observations also seem to apply to news online, which is tightly linked to Twitter (the bubble that journalists live in is the bubble of the open public sphere internet). It’s worth remembering that the internet is a lot more than just this. It is Netflix and other streaming services: ‘top-down’ platforms in which content is created by a small group of professionals and consumed by a large audience. It is small-group communication via messaging apps (one-to-one, or several-to-several). Tolentino’s observations about online hostility probably don’t fit as well to small group communication online (which is 'social' and is online, though maybe it's pedantic to call it part of the 'social internet), and they only apply to Netflix and other mass media insofar as they try to reflect the zeitgeist of the open public sphere internet.   

The Open Public Sphere Internet as Difference Revealer

Now that there are so many people participating in public discourse online, the open public sphere internet has exposed groups to one another that are so unlike one another to begin with, in terms of their values, experiences, and perspectives, that independent of how aggressive or antagonistic they are, this difference is so shocking and threatening that people get freaked out. That is, it isn’t necessary to have people act in a hostile way toward another group, or in a strategic way so as to counter the messaging of others. Merely by expressing themselves, by showing who they are and what they believe, they may set others off.

Human difference was depicted and conceived in a certain way by mass media. It was often visual, concise, and fictional. So yes, traditional/legacy media depicted difference, but in a circumscribed way, made generic through the use of tropes and bracketed as fiction. While we weren’t consuming images of difference via mass media, we spent our time around people who are not terribly different in terms of beliefs, values, and experiences. We spent a lot of time around family, friends, schoolmates, and workmates. If we were out of sync in our beliefs or values, we often avoided those subjects in order to avoid conflict.

The differences that we see online are differences in values being expressed. Those differences always existed (there were always people who believed something that you would have found abhorrent), but we didn’t have to see them every day. We probably were never going to be particularly good at reacting to these differences. Many of us probably always would have perceived them as a threat to our own values. So, it could be argued that the internet is the first technology, the first moment in history, where we really have been confronted with values differences as they have always been. Of course, these online expressions are not pure reflections of any group's beliefs, are manipulated in various ways (though when we’re quickly scanning a feed and clicking on links, we may not recognize this). Nevertheless, despite the fact that they are not representative of the larger group, they are expressions of the beliefs and values of many real people. And maybe we feel this when we go online; we feel how real they are. They are not fictional characters dreamed up by a screenwriter. These are actual people who actually believe the exact opposite of what we believe.

It’s not surprising that people feel threatened by those differences. And so many folks react to the threat with a kind of siege mentality, and then many subsequent cultural expressions and public life become a reflection of that. And the only alternatives seem to be to carve out small clusters within online life via group messaging apps or forsake social media entirely.

What impact does the curdling of the open public sphere internet have on the world?

Why does any of this matter? Is it just a bunch of people bickering in cyberspace or does it have some clear connection to the rest of civic life? If some of us decide ‘to hell with it’ and only use social media for small-group communication and leave Twitter to the trolls, what would it matter?

I do wonder if the relationship between what is said on the open public sphere internet and power (political power, economic power) could change, or is changing. Perhaps when the open public sphere first became widely used in the United States, most people, including journalists and politicians, saw it as a kind of proxy for public opinion, overlooking the fact that only certain types of people expressed themselves. The apparent connection between what went on in the run-up to the 2016 election (expressions of extreme partisanship, particularly an insurgent group of Trump supporters engaging in a kind of online battle on behalf of their chosen candidate) and the outcome of that election (the election of that candidate) supports this view. 

But what if, in the coming months, the same open public sphere internet were to heap praise on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren while continuing to deride Donald Trump and deriding or ignoring Joe Biden, and Biden or Trump end up winning the election? What if that inconsistency between opinion on the open public sphere internet and a democratic election outcome were to happen a few more times in high-profile elections in different democracies? Many people might come to believe that opinion on, say, Twitter, neither reflects nor causes shifts in larger public opinion. Once this is acknowledged, I do wonder if at least some people, either in the general public or in positions of power (e.g., widely-read journalists), would be less likely to take their cues from opinion expressed on the open public sphere internet.

There’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it, I think. When people believe that Twitter is a bellweather, they look to Twitter and are subsequently influenced by opinion on Twitter. The evidence on which they initially base their belief that it is a bellweather might be suspect, but that doesn’t matter: once they believe it, they essentially bring it into being by assuming that it is public opinion writ large, are influenced by it as such, and, through their writing, influence others. That is, opinion leaders see a popular trend on Twitter and write about it as though it were popular more broadly. Others take cues from the opinion leaders and act on that information, turning it into a truly popular opinion. However, if opinion leaders stopped believing this (and again, it wouldn’t matter whether the reason they stopped believing it made much sense or was supported by evidence), they might ignore it and thus Twitter and the like would lose its power to influence public opinion writ large.

Maybe people in a certain social stratum are already leaning this way, avoiding social media (or at least the open public sphere internet) themselves, raising their kids to avoid it as well. These people are often quite powerful: upper class, working in tech, politically active. If they start ignoring opinion as expressed on the open public sphere internet, I can imagine all of it becoming like certain comment sections of certain news websites: it exists, it is ugly, but most readers simply ignore it, and it doesn’t really have much of an impact outside of itself.

In any case, it’s important to not simply assume that the open public sphere internet has a stable relationship with public opinion in general. I think it’s also worth thinking about the popularization of the open public sphere internet as the first moment in human history that we saw how different our views of the world really are, how directly they conflict with one another (there is also much agreement, though the current iteration of the open public sphere internet doesn’t seem suited to highlight that). It’s hard to imagine such a moment going smoothly. But perhaps it’s a matter of getting over the initial collective shock of it. Or perhaps we just need a little time to ourselves.

Thoughts on Post-2016 Election America: Re-examining the "Fringe Fighting" Hypothesis

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.

Egg-manning: Arguing with the fringes

I've been thinking more about writer Dan Brooks's post about the death of the Straw Man and the rise of the Egg Man. I'm not in love with Brooks's name for this "egg-manning" phenomenon (for one thing, googling it currently yields pictures of Peyton Manning being egged, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but is indicative of the requirement of lexical singularity in the age of Google). So far, I've only been able to find one other use of it online (by blogger Tim Hall). But as I read more opinion pieces on both mainstream news websites like the New York Times and encounter news via social media (on Facebook and Twitter, where the person sharing the opinion piece is, in effect, endorsing the argument), I keep returning to this concept.

While straw-manning involves making up an imaginary person who holds a view opposed to your own just so that you can refute it, egg-manning involves finding a real person advancing a real view on social media just so that you can refute it. Finding an actual person essentially justifies the necessity of making your argument. There really are people who must be argued against!

Straw-manning involved assuming that someone out there disagrees with your argument. Egg-manning does not assume this, but instead makes another, typically unstated, assumption. The assumption that egg-manners make is that the person making the argument opposed to their own is part of a large, influential group of people, and that the expression of the argument is part of a larger trend. Rarely is any particular opinion held by only one person; you can search for a hashtag or a term or through various interconnected bits of the blogosphere or social news networks and usually find hundreds or maybe thousands of examples of the argument which you wish to argue against.

The next step in the assumption is the implicit or explicit linking of these hundreds or thousands of people actually stating the argument online with a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the argument, 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 argument online. Most often in the U.S., these large mainstream groups are liberals/Democrats or conservatives/Republicans. Sometimes, they're smaller and/or more amorphous groups, like racists, sexists, Tea-Partiers, Social Justice Warriors, fraternity brothers, hipsters, or many other groups that are partially defined by their stated beliefs and actions. The largest, most amorphous group to be argued against in the U.S. right now is The Establishment. Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the argument online and the large group not stating the argument are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common, which, to the egg-manner, represents a coherent ideological framework.

Even if that group of people isn't large right now, it could become large in the future if its ideas are not argued against. Often times, an example from history is provided to show how quickly ideas can spread if they are not forcefully countered with another argument, a time when silence sealed the fate of a people. In the past, small, vocal groups of people got large less-vocal groups to go along with them. This is intended to make it clear that arguing against a dangerous idea is not so much an act of participating in civil discourse (and thus not subject to the informal rules of civil discourse), but a kind of duty, and that to fail to argue against it would constitute negligence of one's duty.

Sometimes, the egg-manners are correct, as many people who assume things tend to be every now and then: a dangerous view that once was fringe becomes mainstream. It can happen quickly with viral spread of ideas through social media. But other times, the egg-manners are incorrect. The view never becomes one held by more than an un-influential, fringe group online. Of course, if you are able to indefinitely postpone the point at which you believe the fringe idea will become mainstream, you can never be proven wrong, but if we were to require that the aforementioned assumptions be tested (which requires setting a finite time frame in which the fringe idea would become mainstream), I think that many assumptions like this would turn out not to be true.

Then there is the possibility of a backfiring effect: that by arguing against the fringe idea, egg-manners give legitimacy to it, thus bringing about its popularity. Not only are egg-manners raising the profile of ideas with which they argue; they are also providing more examples of opposite arguments for the egg-manners on the other side of argument to use in their egg-manning. There's likely an emotional component to the way in which egg-manning fuels that which it seeks to fight: anger from one side fuels anger from the other.

It's unclear whether egg-manners consider their arguments to be "arguments" in the traditional sense - attempts to convince another person of the truth and/or to provide support for a like-minded person who feels alone - or whether they consider them to be acts of self-expression. If it is the former, the egg-manner should care about the impact of the argument. But if it is the latter, being wrong and ineffective may not matter. It's a rhetorical maneuver that continues to interest me. If only it had a better name.

The Truth, Online

Reading Jill Lepore's review of Michael Patrick Lynch's new book, The Internet of Us, reminded me to write something on the topic of truth. I haven't read Lynch's book yet, but even the sub-title ("Knowing more and understanding less in the age of big data") gave me that all-too-familiar twinge of jealousy, of feeling as though someone had written about an idea that had been gestating in my mind for years before I had the chance to write about it myself, of being scooped. So, during this brief lacuna between the time at which I learned of this book's existence and the time at which I actually read it, let me tell you what I think it should be about, given that title. That is: how is it possible that the Internet helps us to know more and to understand less? Or, to take Lepore's tack, what is the relationship between the Internet/Big Data and the truth/reality?

At this stage, I have only a semi-organized collection of ideas on the topic. I'll base each idea around a question.

To what extent has truth (or reality) become subjective in the age of the Internet/Big Data? 

I think we vastly overestimate the extent to which the Internet has fragmented our sense of truth and/or reality. And by "we," I mean most people who think about the Internet, not just scholars or experts. My sense is that it is a commonly held belief that the Internet allows people access to many versions of the truth, and also that groups of people subscribe to the versions that fit their worldviews. This assumption is at the core of the "filter bubble" argument and undergirds the assertion that the Internet is driving fragmentation of polarization of societies.

I contend that most people agree on the truth or reality of most things, but that we tend not to notice the things we agree on and instead focus on the things on which we do not agree. Imagine that we designed a quiz about 100 randomly selected facets of reality. We don't cherrypick controversial topics. It could be something as pedestrian as: "what color is they sky?" ; "if I drop an object, will it fall to the ground, fly into the sky, or hover in the air" ; "2 + 2 = ?" I'd imagine that people would provide very similar answers to almost all of these questions, regardless of how much time they spend on the Internet. Even when we do not explicitly state that we agree on something, we act as though we believe a certain thing that other people believe as well. We all behave as if we agree on the solidity of the ground on which we walk, the color of the lines on the roadways and what they mean, and thousands of other aspects of reality in everyday life.

The idea that reality or truth is becoming entirely subjective, fragmented, or polarized is likely the result of us becoming highly focused on the aspects on which we do not agree. That focus, in turn, is likely the result of us learning about the things on which we do not agree (that is, of us being exposed to people who perceive a handful of aspects of reality in a very different way than we perceive them) and of truth/reality relating to these handful of aspects genuinely becoming more fragmented. Certainly, it is alarming to think about what society would look like if we literally could not agree on anything, either explicitly or implicitly; so, there is understandable alarm about the trend toward subjectivity, regardless of how small and overestimated the trend may be.

So, I'm not saying that that truth/reality isn't becoming more fragmented; I'm only saying that part of it is becoming that way, and that we tend to ignore the parts that are not.

It's also worth considering the way in which the Internet has unified people in terms of what they believe truth/reality to be. If we look at societies around the globe, many don't agree on aspects of world history, how things work, etc. Some of those people gained access to the Internet and then began to believe in a reality that many others around the globe believe in: that certain things happened in the past, that certain things work in certain ways. Reality and truth were never unified to begin with. The Internet has likely fragmented some aspects of reality and the truth for some, but it has also likely unified other aspects for others.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic or nit-picky, but I think any conversation about the effects of the Internet on our ability to perceive a shared truth/reality should start with an explicit acknowledgment that when people say that society's notion of truth/reality is fragmented, they actually mean that a small (but important) corner of our notion of truth/reality is fragmented. Aside from considering the net effects of the Internet on reality (has it fragmented more than it unified?), we might also consider this question:

What types of things do we agree on?

Are there any defining characteristics of the aspects of truth/reality on which we don't agree? When I try to think of these things (things like abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, racism, economic philosophy, immigration policy, climate change, evolution, the existence of god), the word "controversial" comes to mind, but identifying this category of things on which we don't agree as "controversial" is tautological: they're controversial because we don't agree on them; the controversy exists because we can't agree.

So how about this rule of thumb: we tend to agree on simple facts more than we agree on complex ones. When I think of the heated political discourse in the United States at this time, I think about passionate disagreements about economic policy (what policy will result in the greatest benefit for all?), immigration (ditto), gun rights (do the benefits of allowing more people to carry guns [e.g., preventing tyrannical government subjugation, preventing other people with guns from killing more people] outweigh the drawbacks (e.g., increased likelihood of accidents; increased suicide rates], and abortion (at what point in the gestational process does human life begin?). These are not simple issues, though many talk about them as if the answers to the questions associated with each issue were self-evident.

I can think of a few reasons why truth/reality around these issues is fragmenting. One is, essentially, the filter bubble problem: the Internet gives us greater access to other people, arguments, facts, and data that can all be used by the motivated individual as evidence that they are on the right side of the truth. In my research methods class, I talk about how the Internet has supplied us with vast amounts of data and anecdotes, and that both are commonly misused to support erroneous claims. One of these days, I'll get around to putting that class lecture online, but the basic gist of it is that unless you approach evidence with skepticism, with the willingness to reach a conclusion that contradicts the one you set out to find, you're doing it wrong. Dan Brooks has a terrific blog post about how Twitter increases our access to "straw men." So, not only does the Internet provide us with access to seemingly objective evidence that we are right; it also provides an infinite supply of straw men with which to argue.

In these aforementioned cases in which we disagree about complex issues, we tend not to disagree about whether or not something actually happened, whether an anecdote is actually true or whether data is or is not fabricated. Most disagreements stem from the omission of relevant true information or the inclusion of irrelevant true information. We don't really attack arguments for these sins; we tend not to even notice them, and instead talk past each other, grasping at more and more anecdotes and data (of which there will be an endless supply) that support our views.

If it is the complex issues on which we cannot agree, then perhaps the trend toward disagreement is a function of the increasing complexity and interdependency of modern societies. Take the economy. Many voters will vote for an elected official based on whether or not they believe that the policies implemented by that official will produce a robust economy. But when you stop and think about how complex the current global economy is, it is baffling how anyone could be certain that his or her policies would result in particular outcomes. Similarly, it is difficult to know what the long-term outcomes of bank regulations might be, or military interventionalism (or lack thereof). Outcomes related to each issue involve the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of billions of people, and while the situations we currently face and those we face in the future resemble situations we've faced in the past (or situations that economists, psychologists, or other "ists" could simulate), they differ in many others that are difficult to predict (that's simply the nature of outcomes that involve billions of people over long periods of time). And yet we act with such certainty when we debate such topics! Why is that? This leads to my last question:

Why can't we arrive at a shared truth about these few-but-important topics?

First, there is the problem of falsifiability. Claims relating to these topics typically involve an outcome that can be deferred endlessly. For example, one might believe that capitalism will result in an inevitable worker revolution. If the revolution hasn't occurred yet, that is not evidence that it will never occur; only evidence that it hasn't occurred yet. There's also the problem of isolating variables. Perhaps you believe that something will come to pass at a certain time and then it doesn't, and you ascribe the fact that it doesn't to a particular cause, but unless you've made some effort to isolate the variable, you can't rule out the possibility that the cause you identified actually had nothing to do with the outcome.

There are falsifiable ways of pursuing answers to questions relating to these topics. And despite all the hand-wringing about the fragmentation of truth/reality on these topics, there are also plenty of folks interested in the honest pursuit of these answers; answers that, despite the growing complexity of the object of study (i.e., human behavior on a mass scale), are getting a bit easier to find with the growing amounts of observations to which we have access via the Internet.

The other problem is the lack of incentive to arrive at the truth. Often times, we get immediate payoff for supporting a claim that isn't true, in the form of positive affect (e.g., righteous anger, in contrast to the feeling of existential doubt that often comes with admitting you're wrong) and staying on good terms with those around you (admitting you're wrong is often inseparable from admitting that your friends, or family, or the vast majority of your race or gender or nationality are wrong). So, there are powerful incentives (affective and social) to arrive at certain conclusions regardless of whether or not these are in line with truth/reality. In contrast, the incentives to be right about such things seem diffuse. We would benefit as a society and a species if we all right about everything, right?

I suppose some would argue that total agreement would be bad, that some diversity of opinions would be better. But we don't tolerate diversity of opinion on whether or not the law of gravity exists, or whether 2+2 = 4. Why would we tolerate it in the context of economic policy? Is it just because of how complex economies are, and that to think you have the right answer is folly? (I suppose that's a whole other blog entry right there, isn't it). But certainly, even if you believe that, you'd agree that some ideas about economies are closer to or further from the truth and reality of economies. So, perhaps what I'm saying is that if we lived in a society where "less right" ideas were jettisoned in favor of "more right" ideas, we would all benefit greatly, but that the benefits would only come if a large number of us acted on a shared notion of the truth and that the benefit would be spread out among many (hence, "diffuse").

But what if there were an immediate incentive to be right about these complex issues, something to counter the immediate affective and social payoffs of being stubborn and "truth agnostic?" I love the idea of prediction markets, which essentially attach a monetary incentive to predictions about, well, anything. You could make a claim about economic policy, immigration policy, terrorism policy, etc., and if you were wrong, you would lose money.

Imagine you're a sports fan who loves a particular team. You have a strong emotional and social incentive to bet on your team. But if your team keeps losing and you keep betting on your favorite team, you're going to keep losing money. If you had to participate in a betting market, you'd learn pretty quickly how to arrive at more accurate predictions. You would learn how to divide your "passionate fan" self from your betting self. And if you compare the aggregate predictions of passionate fans to the aggregate predictions of bettors, I'd imagine that the latter would be far more accurate. I would assume it would work more or less the same way with other kinds of predictions. People would still feel strongly about issues and still be surrounded by people who gave them a strong incentive to believe incomplete truths or distorted realities. But they would have an incentive to cultivate alternate selves who made claims more in tune with a shared reality.

Of course, not all issues lend themselves to being turned into bets (how would one bet on whether or not life begins after the first trimester?), but it still seems like, at least, a step in the right direction, and gives me hope for how we can understand the truth and our relationship to it in the Internet age, perhaps even better than we did before.

Survival of the Angriest

My basic sense of the discourse about politics (articles, comments on online news websites, blogs, TV shows, radio shows) is that a certain rhetorical mode or style unifies those on the far right and far left. It is characterized by anger at authorities on the opposite end of an ideological or demographic spectrum. The "bad guy" in this mode could be those who support a patriarchal society, those who support a racist society, Obama, Bush, Congresspeople, university administration, corporations such as Comcast or Walmart, "Wall Street", unions, mainstream media, etc. I'll call this, for lack of a better term, the "anger-laden" rhetorical style. It succeeds by invoking strong, negative emotions in information consumers (arguably, you could include discourse that invokes or reflects anxiety, but prior research suggests that anger and anxiety operate differently when it comes to news). We could contrast this to a drier, scientific, inquiry-based style (a la fivethirtyeight.com), or a style that attempts to present both sides of an issue in a relatively affect-less way (a la The New York Times or the BBC). I recognize, of course, that no sources are totally bereft of affect-invoking content or style, but that when compared to, say, FoxNews or the Huffington Post, it becomes clear that inquiry-based or relatively affect-less sources employ a style that depends less on pushing the anger buttons of the audience.

I sense that in the arena of news or discourse about public issues, the ratio of anger-laden style information to other styles of information has changed, and that this change is associated with increasing partisanship among political leaders (even while the partisanship of the overall US population changes very little).

It is entirely possible that the angry, negative-affect-laden rhetorical style was always dominant (see the rhetoric of some popular newspapers' editorials, muckrakers, etc.), but I would counter that by noting that the decline in consumption of mainstream news sources (which are more apt to favor an affect-less style) and the ascendance of non-mainstream sources (which are more apt to favor an anger-laden style) is undeniable.

Perhaps the ascendance of the anger-laden rhetorical style of conveying political/public opinion information draws in a segment of the population that didn't spend much time reading or viewing such information at all. In other words, there was always anger-laden, affect-less, and inquiry-based styles of conveying this kind of information, but fewer people overall were spending less time with any kind of political information than is the case now. Now, we have more consumption of such information, which sounds great, but actually the people who are new to the conversation are driving the demand for (and the supply of, in a market-based news environment) anger-laden information. So yes, very few people ever consumed affect-less information and they were probably always outweighed by consumers of affect-laden information, but not to the extent that they are outnumbered now that there has been an influx of new news consumers and new news sources to meet the increased demand. The ratio of affect-less to affect-laden information shrunk in response to the demands of an influx of new consumers

This change in that ratio could push moderates out of the online conversation about politics and away from offline political participation. The moderates would still exist, and any public onion poll would detect their presence and reflect an overall population that didn't go through the increase in partisanship that our leadership has undergone. There might be a spiral-of-silence effect happening with the moderates: they see that their voice isn't represented in the articles themselves or the comments sections and so they spend their time on other things: their own families, their own hobbies and interests.

Of course, any such argument lamenting this shift toward affect-laden information leaves one up to the accusation that one is pining away for "the good old days" when sensible, logical elites dominated public discourse and the political arena while the hot-headed rabble kept to the fringes. It is impossible for me to deny the historical reality that elites often dismissed arguments they didn't agree with simply by dismissing rhetorical styles that privileged emotional, subjective experiences over scientific or quasi-scientific approaches. I certainly recognize the value (and inevitability) of emotion in public discourse, and the fact that all arguments contain some combination of objectivity and subjectivity, of "hot" emotion and "cold" logic.

But I just don't see the current use of an anger-laden rhetorical style as the reflection of pre-existing public opinions and rhetorical styles that were heretofore excluded from public discourse. I see it as driving a shift in political thought and behavior, one that excludes anything other than anger (including positive-affect messages favoring compassion, affection, or understanding). And even though it is problematic to assert (either explicitly or implicitly) the superiority of cold rationality, I think its total exclusion (or even a significant reduction) from public discourse would only lead to an increased inability to see the world through anyone else's eyes, and that this wouldn't be a good thing.

But I'm in idle speculation mode here. I seek evidence of this, and I don't have much to point to right now that would suggest I'm on to something or that I'm dead wrong. Does the ascendance of anger-laden information (if it even is truly ascendant) reflect increased political participation and/or does it increase the polarization of elected officials and the disenfranchisement of moderates, lessening any chance we have at mutual understanding?

Hardwiring and Software

At last week's symposium on media choice here at Drexel, the term "hardwired" came up a few times. This term pops up a lot these days in discussions of cognition and I wonder whether its use obfuscates as much as it explains.

The particular context in which it was used last week related to news: how and why certain people attend to certain news sources. People, so the argument went, are hardwired to seek out arguments and evidence with which they agree, and when they do happen to encounter counter-attitudinal arguments and evidence (i.e., stuff with which they don't agree), they are hardwired to interpret it as biased. When used in this context, what does "hardwired" really mean?

Hardwired reactions to stimuli in our environment are automatic and, as the metaphor would suggest, more-or-less permanent. Hardwired cognition/behavior are the products of adaptive processes that occurred over thousands of generations. We are born with these reactions; we don't need to be taught. Our startle reflexes, our orientation to faces, and our fear of spiders are all hardwired. Then there are reactions that are learned and, through repetition and conditioning, become automatic. It's easy to just lump both of these kinds of reactions together because they both involve automatic, quick processing of information without any voluntary control. But the hardwired reactions, I think, are harder to change than the automatic learned reactions because they have been around longer.

So let's assume that the aforementioned tendencies relating to news are, indeed, truly hardwired. None of us had to learn to seek out evidence we agree with and to view evidence that we don't agree with as biased. These information processing strategies evolved over many generations. Perhaps they're extensions of our need to preserve a stable sense of self or a coherent picture of our environment and where the rewards and threats lie or our social standing within a group of allies. This leaves us with a few important (and oft ignored) questions about our hardwired reactions to our information environment.

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be "rewired"? Not easily, if at all. I don't think you could condition folks to seek out counter-attitudinal news and expect them to pass this tendency on to their offspring through their genes (which is what I take "rewired" to mean).

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be overridden? Yes. Actually, I think this happens all the time. All of civilization, it's been said, is a kind of imposition on many of our hardwired reactions to stimuli, an attempt to override and otherwise control (i.e., repress) reactions that would be destructive in the long run to large numbers of people trying to live together (i.e., society). The repression of impulses is so ordinary that we forget the many ways the contours of society keeps them in check, through laws, rules, social mores, and restricted availability.

How strong is a hardwired predisposition? Put another way: how hard would it be to override a hardwired reaction to stimuli? This is another case in which the question of magnitude (what I like to call the "how much" question) is ignored, and I think it's ignored strategically. If you ignore the fact that some hardwired reactions are far easier to overcome than others, you could say that an inborn impulse that is not that hard to control is just like another inborn impulse that is almost impossible to control - they're both "hardwired". If it's somehow to your advantage to say that some behavior is unchangeable (say, if you're defending ideologically polarizing news coverage because it caters to our hardwired orientation toward information), you'll note how it's hardwired and leave it at that.

Just how hard is it to change behavior that is hardwired depends on the behavior, maybe on when it evolved and what's at stake (i.e., how great the reward or punishment for behaving in ways inconsistent with the predisposition). You can get most people to overcome their hardwired desire for sweets easier than you can get them to overcome their hardwired desire for sexual gratification or desire for novel stimuli or inclination toward competition or cooperation. Hardwired reactions or behaviors vary in the extent to which they are capable of being overridden. It is possible to know how hard it is to change a particular hardwired behavior through experimentation.

What the heck does this have to do with software?

The design of software affects what types of information are available to us in certain places at certain times. There are various reasons we're averse to the idea of restricting availability of information in any way. Information is speech, and speech should be free. More information and more freedom to choose just seem like inherently good things. But really, our access to information is restricted, in some sense, all the time. We see a fraction of all available information, if only because we can only process so much information and the amount to which we have access via the Internet has grown exponentially. The fraction of the total news information to which we pay attention is determined primarily by the aforementioned hardwired reactions to stimuli and software that makes certain information available to us based on our prior impulsive behavior (i.e., what we click on without thinking too deeply about it). Perhaps our hardwired reactions to stimuli determine our news consumption behavior not because they're all that hard to change, but because nothing bothered to stand in their way.

Here's some good news: experimenting with information environments is actually much easier than experimenting with our environment in general (i.e., the one we walk around in everyday). Simply installing browser extensions can remove ads from our information environment or restrict access to whatever websites we choose. Algorithms can recommend counter-attitudinal news stories. Installing a "Respect" button on comments sections, next to the "Like" and "Recommend" buttons, can increase the likelihood of exposure to counter-attitudinal messages.

You can't get rid of those hardwired impulses to seek out information we agree with. But can you override them? I don't think we've explored that question fully yet.

The discussion of hardwiring gets at an important underlying issue: how fixed are any of our characteristics? It's an emotionally loaded question. There's a lot at stake. But it's exciting to be able to explore the possibilities of changing ourselves and our hardwired impulses by changing our software.

The Pros and Cons (mostly cons) of Satire

Last week in our news literacy class, we had a great, thought-provoking guest lecture by Dannagal Young. Young’s work is part of a growing body of research providing evidence of the benefits of watching satirical news programs such as The Daily Show.

So far, we have evidence suggesting that Daily Show viewers vote more than non-viewers, participate more in political campaigns, score higher on political knowledge, and consume more news from other news sources. This seems to answer the critics who worry that satirical news programs might lead to cynicism. But perhaps it doesn’t.

There is an assumption that cynicism would manifest itself as (or co-occur with) apathy. If The Daily Show made viewers cynical, then we wouldn’t expect them to be more civically engaged than non-viewers.

Cynicism or Being Principled?

I’d critique the assumption that cynicism’s connection to apathy is the real worry. I’d define and measure cynicism as negativity about something combined with an inability to respond to evidence. So, would a liberal person acknowledge evidence that, say, unions make countries or states less competitive, or would a conservative acknowledge evidence that gun control laws dramatically reduce injury and deaths. Would they just say "you're misinterpreting the evidence" or "you're not looking at the evidence in proper context" or "you're ignoring this other important piece of evidence". An inability to change one's view based on new evidence is, to me, a problem.

But other people (highly partisan people) might refer to this orientation toward new evidence as “principled”: you think that unions are good no matter what, military intervention is bad no matter what, corporate mergers are bad no matter what, government regulation is bad no matter what. So, are you being cynical or are you being principled? In either case, I suspect that exposure to certain kinds of satire news (The Daily Show, or Rush Limbaugh, who could be understood or defended as a satirist) increases the frequency and intensity of this orientation. Meanwhile, websites that present information on the same topics but do so through presenting evidence in a more-or-less straight-faced manner, like fivethirtyeight, might decrease the frequency or intensity of this orientation.

Dannagal Young pointed out, rightly, that getting people to really consider evidence that contradicted existing beliefs would be pretty hard. In some sense, we are “hard-wired” not to do such a thing. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the resistance to certain kinds of evidence is a matter of identity preservation. But it seems worth considering the extent to which media can reinforce this instinct to preserve one’s identity.

Angrier Candidates

Consider the difference between the rhetoric and reputation of two candidates: Bill Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. Or, if you’d prefer to compare conservatives: George W. Bush as a presidential candidate in 1999 vs. Ron Paul. In both cases, the former candidate runs a campaign based on a kind of compassionate rhetoric while the latter candidates run based on distrust and anger at established authorities. Which of these candidates’ rhetoric resonates with voters? I’d argue that the satire of Michael Moore and perhaps that of Jon Stewart cause viewers to favor rhetoric that is based on anger against the status quo rather than rhetoric of compassion. Is this necessarily bad? I’m not sure. But it certainly doesn’t move us any closer to a world in which an informed electorate is selecting a candidate based on evidence as to who might be the most effective candidate. It’s just survival of the angriest.

Increasing skepticism, but of whom?

As Young pointed out during her guest lecture, humor and satire have been used to prompt audiences to question authorities since the days of ancient Greece. But the humor also stops the audience from questioning the arguments made by the comedian (or to view the evidence differently). Humor prompts audiences to let their guard down and cultivate a kind of affinity for the comedian and his.her views. Humor is an effective way to stop people from questioning the authority of the comedian. It reduces people’s ability to counter-argue. Again, will this help people select the best candidate? I think it just makes people less likely to consider evidence that is inconsistent with the worldview implicitly endorsed by the satirist.  

Hard-wiring is not fate

So, can media challenge our existing worldviews by cultivating mindful consideration of the issues of the day? Last week, I hosted a symposium on media choice at Drexel University. One of our guest speakers, Talia Stroud, had an argument similar to Young’s about how we are “hard-wired” to defend our ideological in-group or “tribe”. We are predisposed to political or ideological polarization. The instinct to read other viewpoints and arguments as somehow biased and flawed reflect deep-seated, automatic way of acting and thinking. Stroud presented the results of years of research that, I thought, reflected a terrific persistence and a refusal to accept hard-wired predispositions as unchangeable. She presented the result of study after study in which she and her colleagues tried to reduce ideological polarization when people are exposed to viewpoints that differ from their own. Time and again, the interventions not only didn’t work, but often made people more polarized! Finally, she had seen evidence of reduced polarization when she presented news website users with a “respect” button alongside the ubiquitous “like” button. When people are prompted to respect a viewpoint other than their own along with the ability to endorse it through a comment or a “like”, some of them will do so. This subtle change to websites can affect discourse, and I think this change in discourse could potentially reduce ideological polarization.

Even if a large number of people weren’t ever oriented toward objectively considering evidence for or against a politically-charged topic (e.g., man-made climate change, effects of reducing unemployment benefits) in the past, are we to let this dictate what we’re capable of? Are we mistaking predispositions for unchangeable fate? Are we not to even explore the possibility of change? To do so would seem, well, cynical. And Stroud's research shows that there is already evidence that simple tweaks to the media choice environment cause changes in behavior and, perhaps, thinking, despite whatever hard-wiring we have. 

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.