iandelaney's posterous

More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." In the review she lays out the concept of "group polarization"

People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.

The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” (Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)

It's often remarked that customisable start-pages, self-selected RSS feed readers and social network dynamics tend to result in:

(a) a lack of conflict. People take their cues from the best-established commentators and simply chime in to agree. The number of 'me-too' posts that appear supporting whatever the top ten blogs say is indicative of this.

(b) delusional hysteria. The recent Twitter campaigns against Jan Moir, Nick Griffen, Retweet changes, etc. seem to suggest that many people believe that a trending hashtag can change the world. It can not.

Ironically, it sometimes seems as though nowhere is there less acceptance of differing points of view than among the social media / social networks crowd, where 'discussions' are largely limited to describing just how much of an idiot a particular opponent is.

I believe that the Internet can make us better people and that it can help us make a better world. But this probably isn't the way forward.

So how can we embrace and foster pluralism, diversity, real democracy in networked society?

Maybe I need more unpleasant people around me.

I'm tempted to argue for some return to anonymous debate, a la Usenet and IRC twenty years ago. They could be ridiculous and frustrating in equal measure, but at least your views got challenged and you were (vigorously) exposed to people who think very differently from yourself.

I think we need to think about ways to divide people's work and their online activity in some way. Often, when I read blogs and tweets, I know that the person writing is doing so because it in some way amplifies or enhances their professional career. A lot of people I connect with are consultants of some description in their jobs. Their job is to be wise and right. That makes them lovely people, by and large, but there are arguably downsides. It can very often have the side-effect of meaning that they are never going to go out on a limb or wish to seem controversial. It's also a job where you need people to want to work with you, so you won't go around telling potential clients or collaborators that they're wrong.