Echo Chambers and Blogging
A recent round of discussion has been going on about the "echo" effect of the blogging world and other social phenomena. A great deal of this discussion spawned from the Internet efforts of the Howard Dean campaign. For anyone unsure of the implied meaning:
Echo chamber is a colloquial term used to describe a group of media outlets that tend to parrot each other's uncritical reports on the views of a single source, or that otherwise relies on unquestioning repetition of official sources.
More recently, the term has been used more and more frequently outside of the political context. For many, it has become a catchall for a "collective" thinking model -- possibly even amortized self-righteousness ala "I'm right, you say the same thing, therefore I'm right (and you are too). David Weinberger comments on this:
I'm a little confused about the meme du jour, "echo chambers" -- those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them. Here are three places I frequent that seem to fit the bill:
First, I'm on an invitation-only mailing list for moderate lefty Democrats interested in the intersection of ideology and technology. We are all committed to dumping Bush and there's no real possibility we're going to change our minds. Want to argue about it? Not here. We have other things to talk about.
Second, I used to participate occasionally in the Dean weblog comment boards. If you went there to argue that Bush was more deserving of our votes, people would either ignore you or brand you a troll -- and then ignore you.
Third, this fall I went to a baseball game and cheered the Red Sox more loudly than if I had been the only one yelling. My bleacher mates were surprisingly unwilling to talk with me about whether the Sox were deserving of our collective support.
Are any of these really echo chambers?
Last week, Joi Ito added to the mix with a commentary, "Communities and echo chambers". The topic initiated was about group membership and a question about how well individuals materialize out of a community versus the community materializing out of the individual. Not surprisingly, this has been a problem historically (History: Fact vs. Interpretation, Publishing: Truth vs. Advertising) and it is difficult to come to any real consensus on the matter considering the contexts they must be evaluated from. As Joi states:
Shelly asks the question "What part of you, the writer, is part of a community? Where, within yourself, does community leave off and you begin?" and says, "But I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons." This is an interesting question that Shelley has pointed out to me and I have been thinking about. In the comments on Shelley's blog, Doc ties it to the notion of the "echo chamber," the effect where we're all just talking to each other oblivious to the outside world. Many people blame the failures of the Dean campaign to this "echo chamber" and point to this "echo chamber" as a problem that is prevalent on blogs. I do see the risks, but I don't think criticizing the existence of communities or friendships is the solution. I think that communities and friendship are the foundations of trust and love and I do not agree that an aggregate of facts and single voices are the solution to finding the "ultimate truth" in writing.
I believe that communities and the feeling of community are an essential part of the equation, but that the goal is to bridge many communities and try to expand one's notion of community the largest possible size.
Yesterday, both Kevin Jones and danah boyd both chimed in on the matter. Kevin provides an interesting reflection on the blogging world from an experience with a "intelligent, articulate tech industry guy":
I'm going to be looking into the commercialization possiblities of the blogosphere, specifically the events, software and services components, so the fact that an idea is already being deconstructed before it reaches outside the inner guard world (echo chamber) is significant. Will the blogosphere be a victim of failure to launch?
[...]
So what are the commercial possibilties of the blogosphere, and will they survive excessive and continual redesign and creative meme canibalization, or maybe just creative consumption and repurposing?
Commercialization is not what bloggingt is about, but this world has demonstrated its political power. So, what are the limits and extents of its commercial power?
And in what way does asking this question taint the space as a whole? Is this like putting up a billboard in a park or could it be a step to a conscious commerce where we regain control of the economic system and create an economy that, I don't what should I say, that we can be proud of, or in a nod to my more reflexively leftist friends, that we don't have to feel about, that mitigates the environmental and social costs it externalizes while creating more opportunity?
danah questions if we've settled on the right context for evaluating blogging as an echo chamber at all. I believe she rightly identifies that the conversations have somewhat degraded and turned into more of a contest than an analysis. As she states:
In social networks literature, there's a concept called homophily. The basic idea is that birds of a feather stick together. There's a good reason for this. The more we have in common with someone, the more points of context, the more capable they are of supporting us. We are more likely to gain social and emotional support from people who are awefully similar to us. Our strong ties are usually very similar to us.
One approach for considering the echo-chamber question would be to analyze the strength of relationships between bloggers. If we're going to talk about a notion of "community," we have to think about what the focus of the community is. Often, the focus involves activity. Some might argue that blogging is enough of an activity to link the community together. But if this were the case, there would be a random probability that any blogger would link to any other blogger. This is not the case. My hunch would be that a blogger is more likely to link to other bloggers who share multiple points of context in common. This does not mean that two people have to share political values in common, but this is a completely valid context to share. Furthermore, the more contexts two people have in common, the more likely that they will know each other. Thus, it is more likely for two like-minded bloggers to know each other than two diverse people.
Part of the problem with having this discussion surround blogging is that blogging is relatively new. Only a few years ago, there were very few bloggers. As such, i would suspect that political views were less important because the fact that the person was a blogger (a rare thing) made them interesting enough to connect to. As there are more bloggers, blogging doesn't end up being as strong a context point as before.
Source: "echo-chambers and homophily", danah boyd
As for me, I don't have too strong of an opinion on the matter. As I most intuitively know, people tend to aggregate around centers that develop and promote similar conceptual models. We are often reluctant to place ourselves in a defensive position. I believe in Barabási's "Linked" he makes note of this phenomena as it impacts "Preferential Attachment". I'll find an excerpt later to add to this. I also know that in terms of blogging, I have worked to inform and update as many people I can regardless of affiliation or pre-disposition -- as I see value in the technology and the community. So yeah, maybe there is an echo, but it's moving fast.