After my last blog post, Gideon Burton directed my attention to Nyssa Silvester's chapter in Writing About Literature in the Digital Age. Here, Silvester explores "echo chamber theory," the idea that an excessively personalized internet environment limits a user's exposure to throngs of opinions and resources available to otherminded users. The concept extends itself by claiming that users who fail to actively seek out alternative opinions or resources on the web lapse into a perpetual cycle of reaffirming their own beliefs, as output matches input matches output.
In the first place, the internet's disregard for privacy can be frightening. In its algorithmic, illimitable (though still often awkwardly-executed) ability to troll our lives for data and personalize content for us, the internet reminds me of the story of the Target shopper whose father discovered she was pregnant after receiving baby ads based on her purchasing preferences. Yeah. Awkward. Life's a moving target; apparently we're all moving targets.
Privacy violations in the name of internet capitalism are frequent enough that most of us are used to the idea of trading our rights for access, effectively using our personal information as currency; well, they have to fund this thing somehow, or I can trust x company with my location as long as they don't have my birthday, or, in the tradition of the dilemma of countless Facebook users, something doesn't feel right here, but I guess I can trust Zynga with a majority of my significant personal information so I can play a few games.
Anyway, whether we knowingly consent to the use of our personal information online, advertisers and other entities inevitably find pieces of us and assemble pictures of who we are. The result can be an affected--even false--web experience for us in which the boundless internet becomes focused advertisement. The echo chamber produced may have a much greater influence than we're willing to believe. After all, what does the internet lose by refining its understanding of us? Isn't that what it's supposed to do? Doesn't it serve me when I Google "dermatologist" and the top results are for doctors in Provo, UT? Doesn't it make sense that LinkedIn tries to connect me with friends and colleagues from BYU before those at other institutions?
The problem here is that the internet tries to function as a free market and a local tool while simultaneously asserting a global experience. How do we eliminate the echo chamber this conflict creates? Silvester encourages us to leave our comfort zones, refrain from being elitist or relying on dogma, and reach out to other communities. I agree with her prescriptions.
However, there's also an underlying problem to address: most people don't recognize they're in echo chambers in the first place. At least one reason for this seems clear. Often when we surf the net, we frantically shift in and out of communities without realizing it. How is it that we seamlessly switch from talking to a single friend in Rhode Island to a class of peers in Utah to a global retailer in Shenzhen to a local market in New York all in a single internet session while barely realizing we engaged with different communities? Instead, we say we talked to our friends on the "internet," or on Facebook or Google+. We shopped on Amazon. Yahoo gave us a search result.
The fact that we're traversing communities gets lost in translation. The experience becomes less personal. Everything starts to run together. We delude ourselves into thinking of the internet as one big community rather than many small, interrelating parts. Subsequently, we stop thinking critically and default to cruise control. Focused advertisements and manipulated search results begin to define our internet experience and we turn inward, creating echo chambers. The internet becomes more amusing, entertaining, and self-serving as we become less interactive, attentive, and socially tied to communities.
So, how can we solve our recognition problem? I think Google+ is pointing the internet in the right direction by making the boundaries between internet communities more clearly defined. Its segregation of users into Circles will, if nothing else, remind users that they share membership in communities, which bolsters social responsibility, strengthens social contracts, and makes the Google+ experience more personal and meaningful. Google's strategy turns users outward to communities and, at least partially, prevents them from hooking inward on themselves.
A potential pitfall of Google+ Circles may be that they aren't sufficiently standardized; for example, if Bill puts Suzy in the "Digital Culture" community and Suzy puts Bill in the "Friends" community, it could complicate their relationship and may allow echo chambers to form. Any thoughts?
Thanks for thinking and writing about my chapter, Brandon! That was neat to see, and it looks like the Digital Civ classes are getting better and better with each iteration. I've been really impressed with the blog posts I've seen so far.
ReplyDeleteI've been doing a lot of thinking about this kind of issue since I wrote about it a year and a half ago. I remember at the end of the class that Dr. Burton had us evaluate how well we had fulfilled the course requirements (Consume, Create, Connect). I struggled with the connect topic--I had tried to reach out to people, but most of my connection had been done with the people in my class.
The point I'm getting at here is that I love what you said about people not realizing the communities they're crossing as they interact on the web. The idea of echo chambers is especially pernicious when we see the Internet as a place where we can "choose" our friends. As echo chamber theory points out, we really do not have the choice we would imagine, and if we're not careful, our Internet wanderings can be an exercise in self-indulgence. This becomes truly harmful when we neglect the local communities we have where we live in favor of having our opinions cranked back to us by customization algorithms. When you're told to love your neighbor, it's far better to not have a choice instead of to be presented the illusion of one.
Basically, my viewpoint on this was completely altered when someone from my Enlightenment literature class (with whom I disagreed politically) talk about how lamentable it is that people focus so much on national politics, especially when they usually only get rumor mill grist and sound bytes, and pay no attention to their local government and goings-on. Because of echo chambers and the form of Internet media consumption, we find it hard to depart from the reductive and sensational national political headlines and really dive into the more complex and admittedly mundane element of paying attention to our local communities.
There has to be a balance, and I think the Internet is slowly gesturing toward that. SEO protocol now specifies that articles have to be at least 500 words long to really matter in a search result, a good encouragement for more in-depth thinking. And while I'm concerned about the increasingly capitalistic ways that Google presents its search results, I know that there are people out there trying to think about larger issues and use the web for advocacy, not just self-indulgence.
So again, thanks for the mention. I look forward to reading more from you and your class.
Hey, Nyssa! Thanks for your reply!
DeleteI'm grateful to have had your source material to base something of a thought on. It was fun to make the connection that I knew you from elsewhere after I originally wrote the post, as well. Coincidentally, you're my first extra-class connection, so you've helped me out twice now; I guess I owe you one.
As to your comment, I think your observations about the political process are interesting. For the past week or so, I've been working with a few classmates to develop a final course project to connect echo chambers to the 2012 presidential election. Your idea to focus on local communities as a way to reduce the effects of political echo chambers has an attuned scope. We'll have to take notice that our final product generates interest in local issues, communities, or the city itself somehow.
Thanks again for your input, and godspeed editing every publication under the sun this semester. As my Chinese friends say, "Ga yauh" (add oil)!
I'll see you tomorrow in the city.