I wrote this post back on February 27, 2011, but decided to re-post it here as the talk of echo-chambers is once again showing up in various articles and blogs. This was an expanded version of what I said at AAAS meeting in Washington DC and the original post (see the link) contains a longish intro, providing some more context, which I decided to cut out of the post here.
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Social norms build and enforce echo-chambers
You want to remain in a friendly relationship with the people you see (or potentially can see) often: neighbors, family, colleagues and friends. Nothing makes for a more unpleasant interaction than discussion of politics, ideology or religion with the people you disagree with.
Thus, there is a social norm in place: politics and religion are taboo topics in conversation. It is considered bad manners to start such conversations in polite company.
This means that most people are not exposed to views other than their own in their day-to-day interactions with other people.
In a small tightly-knit community where everyone?s politics and religion are the same (and people tend to move to such places in order to feel comfortable, on top of most likely being born in such a community to begin with), there is no need to discuss these topics as everyone already agrees. If the topic is discussed, there are no other opinions to be heard ? it?s just back-slapping and commiserating about the evil enemies out there.
In mixed communities, the taboo against discussing politics and religion is strongly enforced. Again, as a result, there is not much chance to hear differing opinions.
There is no more airtight echo-chamber than a small community which interacts predominantly within itself, and not so much with the outside world.
Mass media builds and enforces echo-chambers
If you are born and raised by parents with a particular set of beliefs, you will also inherit from them the notions of which media outlets are trustworthy. If you were raised in the reality-based community, you are unlikely to waste much time with the media of the fantasy-based community (and vice versa). If your parents read Washington Post, you are unlikely to read Washington Times. You?ll prefer New York Times and not New York Post. MSNBC rather than Fox News. NPR rather than Limbaugh show on the radio.
But it is even worse than that ? the choice is really not as broad. The media shapes the public opinion by choosing what is and what is not respectable opinion, i.e., ?sphere of legitimate debate? ? what opinions to cover as serious, what opinions to denigrate and what opinions to ignore. There are many ideas that people hold that you will never see even mentioned in the US mass media and some of those are actually very legitimate in the Real World.
Furthermore, the press then divides the ?respectable opinion? into two opposites, gives voice to each of the two, and will never actually tell you which of the two is more reasonable than the other ? ?we report, you decide?, aka, He Said She Said journalism.
By presenting every issue as a battle between two extremes (and the fuzzy, undefinable ?middle? is reserved only for them, the wise men), the mainstream press makes every opinion something to be sneered at, both those they deem worthy of mentioning and the unmentionable ones.
By refusing to acknowledge the existence of many stands on any issue, by refusing to assign Truth-values to any, by looking down at anyone who holds any opinion that is not their own, the mainstream press fosters the atmosphere of a bipolar world in which enmity rules, and the wagons need to be circled ? the atmosphere that is so conducive to formation and defense of echo-chambers and yet so devoid of airing of any alternatives.
The Web breaks echo-chambers
When an individual first goes online, the usual reaction is shock! There are people in the world who believe what!?!?
The usual first response is anger and strenuous attempts at countering all other ideas and pushing one?s own.
But after a while, unbeknown to the person, all those various novel ideas start seeping in. One is not even aware of changing one?s own mind from one year to the next. Many ideas take time to process and digest and may quietly get incorporated into one?s gradually enriching and more sophisticated worldview.
We all learn from encountering all those other opinions even if we vehemently disagree with them. And we cannot help bumping into them all the time. There are no taboo topics online, no social norms preventing people from saying exactly what they think.
Forming, finding or defending a vacuum-sealed echo-chamber online is extremely difficult, if at all possible.
Your Facebook friends will post stuff that reveals their politics is different than yours (and you did not even know that about them before ? they seemed so nice in real life!). By the time you get around to blocking them?it?s too late ? the virus has already entered your head [this one sentence added 2-27-11].
People you follow on Twitter because of some common interest (e.g., food or knitting or parenting or technology or geographic area) may be very different from you when concerning some other interest, e.g., religion, and will occasionally post links to articles that contain opinions you have never heard of before.
If you are, for example, a liberal and tend to read only liberal blogs, you will constantly see links to conservative sites that are being debunked by your favourite bloggers ? thus you will be exposed to conservative ideas daily.
If your interest is science, you are even luckier. The mainstream media, if it links to anything at all, tends to link either to each other or to governmental sources (e.g., CDC, USDA, etc.). Political bloggers link a lot more, but again the spectrum of sources is pretty narrow ? they link to MSM, to governmental pages, and to each other (including the ?opposition? bloggers).
But science bloggers link to a vastly broader gamut of sources. If mass media is linked to at all, it is usually in order to show how bad the coverage was of a science story. Linking to each other is important (and that includes linking to anti-science sites when needed to counter them), but what science bloggers do that others do not is link to scientific papers, documents, databases, even raw data-sets (including some Open Notebook Science bloggers who pipe data straight from their lab equipment onto the web).
What echo-chamber? Contrary to what some uninformed op-eds in the mass media like to say, the Web breaks echo-chambers that the social norms and mass media have previously built.
The online and offline social networks can work synergistically to affect real change
Many curmudgeons like to say that the Web does not do anything on its own. They (unlike behavioral biologists) do not understand the distinction between Proximal Causes and Ultimate Causes. Web is a tool that allows, among other things, many more people in much shorter time to organize to do something useful in the real world.
Release of Tripoli 6 was an instance in which massive outpouring of support online (centered around now-defunct blog ?Effect Measure?) forced the mainstream media to cover the story which then forced the hand of politicians to do something.
Likewise, in the case of resignation of George Deutsch from NASA, it was investigative work by a blogger, Nick Anthis, that energized the blogosphere, which pushed the MSM to finally report on the story, which forced the event to happen.
PRISM was an astroturf website built to counter the pro-open-access NIH bill in the US Senate. Outpouring of online anger at the tactics by the publishers? lobby inundated the senatorial offices ? as a result the bill passed not once, but twice (GW Bush vetoed the first version of the large omnibus bill it was a part of, then signed it with no changes in the language on this particular issue) and the Senate is now educated on this issue.
But probably the best example is the Dover Trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) that made Intelligent Design Creationism illegal to teach in US public schools. The ruling by Judge Jones (pdf) is one of the most powerful texts in the history of judicial decisions I am aware of.
There are anti-evolution bills popping up somewhere in the country seemingly every week. But because of the Dover ruling, they are all illegal. Most don?t make it to the committee, let alone to the floor of the state legislatures. Others are soundly defeated.
Before Dover, both Creationist sites and pro-evolution sites, when linking to me, would bring approximately the same amount of traffic to my blog. After Dover, getting a link from PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Larry Moran or Jerry Coyne brings substantial new traffic. Links from Creationist sites? Essentially undetectable by traffic trackers ? I discover them only when I search my blog URL to specifically see if there are new links out there. Creationism, while still popular with many people, is politically essentially dead. The Dover ruling castrated it.
But Dover Trial would not have gone that way, and would not result in such a gorgeously written document by the Judge, if it was not for a small army of bloggers who contribute to the blog Panda?s Thumb. A mix of scientists from different disciplines, lawyers, etc., this group has been online ? first on Usenet, later on the blog ? for a couple of decades before the trial.
This is a group of people who battled Creationists for many years, online and offline, in courtrooms and political campaigns, in classrooms and in print. They know all the characters, all the usual creationist ?arguments? (and provided all the answers to them in one place), all the literature, etc.
It is one of them who discovered that the new Intelligent Design ?textbook? is really just a reprint of an old Creationist book, in which the word ?Creationists? was replaced by ?Intelligent Design proponents? throughout the text?.except in one place where they made a typo: ?Cdesign proponentsists?.
Ooops ? a huge piece of evidence that Intelligent Design Creationism is just a warmed-up version of the old-style Creationism masquerading as something new. The Panda?s Thumb bloggers were at the trial as expert witnesses who provided all the expert evidence that Judge Jones needed to make his decision. People who organized on the Web have helped a meatspace history come to pass.
The online and offline social networks can work synergistically if the ecology is right
When looking at the role of online communities and networks in meatspace events, counting the numbers of networked citizens (or ratio of networked to non-networked citizens) is not sufficient ? one also needs to know their geographic distribution, and their connectedness with non-networked citizens. The most fresh example are the so-called ?Twitter revolutions? in the Arab world.
There are at least two possible scenarios (or thought experiments) that demonstrate the importance of ecological thinking about social networks:
1) There are 10 people on Twitter in a country. All in the same city, all in the same college dorm, good friends with each other. No communication with other people. No Twitterati in other cities. Nobody knows that other people in other cities have the same negative feelings toward the government.
2) There are 10 people on Twitter in a country. One each in 10 different cities. They communicate with each other via social networks continuously. Each is also a center of the local community of thousands of non-networked people using offline methods of communication. Through this connection, they become aware that there are millions of them, all over the country, and that a revolution is feasible.
In scenario 1, there are 10 buddies dreaming of revolution. In scenario 2, there are thousands of people in ten cities organizing revolution. In both, there are only 10 people on Twitter. Yet, the outcome is likely to be very different (I am aware that March 1991 demonstrations against Milosevic in Serbia were likewise coordinated by about a dozen people, well positioned around the city, who had email ? most of us learned about the existence of email years later).
Thus, the ecology of the networkers, their spatial and temporal distribution, and their effectiveness in informing not just each other but many non-networked citizens, are important data one needs for this exercise.
?Echo-chamber? is just a derogatory term for ?community?
I shamelessly stole this sub-heading from Chris Rowan on Twitter.
A great example of a case where the Web produced a community (aka echo-chamber) but that was a good thing, is the case of American atheists.
Before the Web, each atheist in the USA thought he or she was the only one in the country. The social norms about the impoliteness of discussing religion, as well as the real fear of reprisals by the religious neighbors, made atheism completely invisible. No need to mention that the media never mentioned them ? they were outside of the ?sphere of legitimate debate?.
But then the Web happened, and people, often pseudonymously, revealed their religious doubts online. Suddenly they realized they are not alone ? there are millions of atheists in the country, each closeted before, each openly so after! It is not a surprise that ?no belief? is the fastest-growing self-description in questions about religion in various nation-wide polls and censuses.
President Bush Senior, himself not very religious, could say that atheists are not real American citizens. A decade later, his son G.W. Bush, himself a fundamentalist, could not say that any more ? his speechwriters made sure he mentioned atheists in the listings of all the equally American religious groupings.
Not all online communities need to be politically active. Discovering people with the same interest in knitting is nice. Exchanging LOLcat pictures is fun. But such interactions also build ties that can be used for action in the real world if the need arises.
Without the Web, I would not know many people whose friendship I cherish. Without the Web I would not have this job. Without the Web, me and many of my friends would have never gone to a meeting like AAAS or ScienceWriters or WCSJ. There would be no such meetings as ScienceOnline, SpotOn London, SciBarCamp, SciFoo, and others.
Every time I travel I make sure that people I know online ? from blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. ? know I am traveling. I say on which date, at which time, I will be in which restaurant in which city. Twenty people show up. Most I have never met in real life before. But after sharing a meal, a beer, a handshake and a hug, our weak ties become strong ties. Superficial relationships become friendships. If there is a need to organize some real-world action ? we can rely on each other to participate or help.
I have a separate Dunbar Number in each city I visited. And I try to connect them to each other even more than they are already connected via online communication. Which is one of the reasons we organize conferences and one of the reasons I am online all the time.
Related:
As Science Bloggers, Who Are We Really Writing For? by Emily Anthes.
Are science blogs stuck in an echo chamber? Chamber? Chamber? by Ed Yong.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=e15ffa12707d554e50ffd4814a66c088
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Today, the largest university system in the world, the California State University system, announced a pilot for $150 lower-division online courses at one its campuses--a move that spells the end of higher education as we know it. Lower division courses are the financial backbone of many part-time faculty and departments (especially the humanities). As someone who has taught large courses at a University of California, I can assure readers that my job could have easily been automated. Most of college--the expansive campuses and large lecture halls--will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools hurd students online.