Bubble Trouble

The central thesis, and its political implication, seem like quite loud echoes of Sunstein’s “Republic.com” (available for a penny used on Amazon now). Yet I don’t see it mentioned in the review at all. If you’ve not checked it out, you might like to.

Oh for the pre-internets days when reported information was more accurate and individuals were more likely to be confronted with contrary facts or different viewpoints.

I too am gravely worried by the obvious tendency of Google to personalize my searches. Soon Wikipedia will be inaccesible via search – who wants a neutral viewpoint or facts? Snopes and politifact are clearly on the verge of extinction.

I yearn for the time when we would adventurously seek out different demographics, not self-select our friends and acquaintances, and subscribe to multiple newspapers for the edification of clashing editorial viewpoints.

And, obviously, the difference between Google ranking certain political sites higher based on what I always click, and Google flooding me with links to blogs I have no intention of visiting, is profound. Surely if you show an avid reader of Mother Jones enough links to the Weekly Standard, he’ll click them – even though he doesn’t want to click them.

If anything Henry, I think you were too mild in your criticism.

#4 and #5.

I don’t really care whether the Internet filter bubble is a bit bigger or a bit smaller than the Peter Jennings filter bubble. You don’t have to yearn for ye golden age of broadminded yokels to be concerned about the argument. And the TV vs Internet phrasing is a bit 2004 anyway: Google is TV’s friend, as Eric Schmidt told the UK television industry in Edinburgh last week.

These “filter bubbles” are merely the reflection of what social products we have at this particular moment. I mean, you could *easily* imagine a Wikipedia-like Facebook product that operates totally differently than what we got now.

For instance, if I could quit my job tomorrow I’d make a timeline-based personal history social website. You could write your own history, which would satisfy the narcissists out there — but it’d also allow anyone to contribute to entries for events you’ve described. Events would be open to all, and searchable and editable by time and location.

You could imagine how this type of social product would allow for contribution and dialog, rather than fortress-building. I think such sites will be more common, as they encourage debate (something folks seem to like) but will also tear down the “bubbles.”

I think it is worth combining this with something else you wrote Henry, which, iirc, showed that an universal expansion of personal choices was compatible with a narrowing of the global range of options.

Oddly enough, I recently finished two related books: The Big Sort, and Bowling Alone. One of the premises of The Big Sort is that people were moving into like-minded communities, which resulted in that kind of filter bubble occurring in meatspace. I suspect that the issues raised in Bowling Alone (that people were withdrawing from community and communal events) is driven by the fact that folks don’t feel like we’re all Americans (did we ever? or was it only a mythological nostalgia that says we were?), and that a more us vs. them attitude has been going on for a long time. While the internet could be used to break down cultural and tribal boundaries, what it appears to me to be going on is the opposite: reinforcing attitudes and biases to the exclusion of other information.

This self-reinforcement may have unhappy consequences for politics. Pariser, who is inspired by the philosophy of John Dewey, argues that ideological opponents need to agree on facts and understand each other’s point of view if democracy is to work well.

I think unhappy consequences is an understatement. I also think that a model for the spiraling decline in discussions between ideological opponents is that of the abortion debate. Neither side is able to actually talk to the other side anymore, and neither side really wants to bother. Folks who try to bridge the gap get marginalized by both sides.

And as for agree on facts, I claim that the model to understand is the delaying tactics of the tobacco industry. Scientific evidence that tobacco caused disease started appearing at the end of the 19th Century, yet they spent a fortune on advertising and false science trying to convince the public otherwise. And they succeeded in delaying the inevitable for almost a century. The books Trust Us, We’re Experts and Toxic Sludge Is Good For You show how those tactics of muddying issues and denying evidence have been appropriated by other industries.

No, I’m not finding it. Anyway, I think it was you Henry who pointed out that an increase in the range of available consumer choices for individuals is compatible with an increased global homogenization of, say, styles of music or other cultural goods. The internet makes each of us aware of more of what was previously only locally available, so we get to choose from the whole world, but within each local segment variation goes down. Something like that.

Yes Tom, that’s the one!

I don’t see any evidence that the internet has made us “much more social”.

It might be that you’re limiting ‘social’ to ‘face-to-face.’ Getting away from that, the internet’s a popular communications tool that has made many forms of previously impossible interaction possible, and quite a lot of people take advantage of that regularly. (I’m too lazy to pre-emptively go find evidence of this assertion, ‘least not until someone explicitly disputes it. It seems pretty self-evident.) I’m pretty sure the Internet has only made a negligible number of people less social, so long as we’re careful to acknowledge any form of potentially two-way or multi-way communication as equally social, e.g. [1 hour of reading blogs and commenting when moved to do so] = [1 hour of listening to a friend over coffee and interjecting when moved to do so]. IMO interacting with someone over the ‘net really shouldn’t count for less than interacting with someone face-to-face.

I agree that many of us individually are better informed thanks to the internet but collectively that doesn’t seem to be the case

Okay, let me acknowledge upfront that folks are not terribly well-informed about the consequences that follow from achieving specific political objectives, relative to what either of us would consider satisfactory. But a lot more people are better informed about, for example, the lyrics to their favorite songs, the goings-on of sports franchises they support, current weather conditions in the cities where their distant relatives live, etc.

Ok, the topics I just listed aren’t really germane to this discussion, set them aside. There’s one topic that is germane, which I tried to mention earlier — a lot more of us know a lot more about the opinions and thoughts of people we like, specifically including the things that people we like and identify with believe are true. (Truthy things, if you like Colbert’s neologism.) There’s a natural shortcut in the brain, accepting that category as a stand-in for things that are true. Beliefs stand in for facts when their source is well-liked. My guess is that you’d assert Obama is a socialist doesn’t count as information, and a person doesn’t count as better-informed if they receive and accept an Obama is a socialist message from their favorite blog. We agree, a lot of those opinions and thoughts are based on false or questionable facts, and/or derived via faulty or sloppy reasoning, but I’d say the recipients of that information are highly unlikely to care about that (they’re likely to feel a natural disdain for the source that conflicts with the source they like).

So the problem’s not really how do we achieve a more informed or less ignorant population, the problem’s how do we successfully change what people want, so that they want to obtain the kind of information we feel is relevant and vitally important? How do we get folks to desire the types of information we want them to desire, enough to at least google around and navigate through easily-available sources, critically but receptively? The distinction is important: improving access to information won’t matter nearly so much as constructing a context in which that information is desired and corresponding misinformation is heavily disdained.

People find bubbles they like, and the more we enable and expand forms of social interaction, the more likely it is that people will successfully find and embed themselves into bubble-communities they like. So our goal should be to make sure folks have positive early life experiences that motivate them to seek out bubbles we approve of, or at least, bubbles we don’t disapprove of.

(Peoples’ bubble-preferences can change in adulthood, but I’m skeptical that peoples’ bubble-preferences can be changed in adulthood with any consistency. People are fairly resilient to that kind of pressure.)

The “filter bubble” argument always seems to be in comparison to a world where all Americans get their news in perfect balance from Peter Jennings.

Yeah. Its implicit assumption is a perfectly balanced liberal republic with an electorate in which preferences are normally distributed along an axis from, eh, Republicans to Democrats, what are you a commie or something? And where the media delivers all white citizens a perfectly balanced evening news report on the horrific and utterly stupid war their government just kicked off in Vietnam.

@Alex – I see the opposite case being made too. The old world was Mainstream Media Establishment Opinion Delivered By White Guys In Suits, and the new world – in contrast – is the Non-Establishment Voice of Real People on blogs and so on.

But this suffers from the same issue as I pointed out at @21 – if you are going to include niche media on the Internet, you have to include niche media in the offline world too when you are doing your comparison.* Does a modern-day Chomsky** or I F Stone have more or less impact than the Vietnam day equivalents? Has Wikileaks had more or less impact than the Pentagon Papers?

Personally, I think that the technology reshapes the channels through which we operate, but I don’t see it altering the overall balance between establishment and anti-establishment views very much.

* Self-promotion alert: I tried to sum up the general fallcy here.
** Yes, I know Noam is still out there doing his admirable thing, but you get what I mean.

My the problem with the filter bubble criticism is that it treats people too narrowly as consumers of culture, not as potential producers. It assumes that the only benefit of removing gatekeepers is from the range of choices that makes available to (and then, actually taken by) potential consumers, as opposed to directly valuing their participation in production. If I’m writing a blog post that will be read by a few dozen people, that’s time I can’t spend reading novels.

What about a world in which everybody consumes a bit less culture, and (in some senses) more narrowly than they used to, but many times more people are producers of culture in some capacity, able to reach an audience of some sort, even if it is a very small audience? Isn’t that what we’re actually looking at? That doesn’t directly refute the claim that we are enclosing ourselves in bubbles, but it prevents an apples-to-apples comparison of people in smaller bubbles w/ a mic to people in bigger bubbles w/o a mic.

Salient @20 Online interactions are equal to offline ones for purposes of being exposed to new authors/information, but while they certainly have an emotional and affective dimension, they are definitely not the same as offline interactions in that respect (I won’t say “unequal”, although one probably could say this).

tomslee – Yeah, a few minutes after writing that I thought, “wait a minute, why did I exclude phatic interactions? That was silly. Worse than silly. Phatic interactions are a core component of socializing.” I think I had originally meant to do somewhat the opposite, carefully giving some kind of sympathetic credit to people who might exchange “hi” with coworkers on the way in yet feel lonely and under-socialized, but [1] I’m not sure there was any reason to be preoccupied with that and [2] my refusing to acknowledge what little social interaction such a person does have in their live is obviously not a good way to be sympathetic.

Kaveh — definitely, it’s natural for people to value certain forms of social interaction over others, so “hi / hi / [walk past each other]” probably counts for something but not very much, unless someone happens to really like that exchange. Obviously there’s no point in being prescriptive about how a person should order the value of various forms of communication, I just suspect that if we tried to collect empirical data, a plurality of people would rank internet exchanges much much much more highly than most folks tend to presume off the cuff.

I made it through this thread, including most of the links!

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ezra abrams 09.05.11 at 10:22 pm

am i being to snarky in saying that anyone who uses the word normative, outside of highly technical specialized writing, is a dunce ?

I thought about this comment. It is precisely the use of terms like “normative”, “deontological”, “eschatological” and now, “phatic”, that keeps the trolls away. It’s very hard to comment on posts and threads if every sentence has a word you don’t understand. In effect, “vocabulary as defense against trolls”.

Enjoyed the discussion, but haven’t formed a real opinion yet.

To the extent that this ‘filter’ hypothesis implies that people are the helpless victims of their informatic environment, it’s nonsense. People who want to remain informatically insulated have always been able to do so. People who want informatic diversty have always been able to find it, no more than ever.

Further, to the extent that this ‘filter’ hypothesis implies that we are helpless informatic victims, it is not only wrong, but dangerous. For it continues the pervasive post-modern notion that we are always already the hapless victims of hegemonic systems beyond our control and even beyond our ken.