How to Burst the “Filter Bubble”: Thursday Focus (January 2, 2014)

How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” | MIT Technology Review:

“Filter bubble”… Eli Pariser coined [the term] to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world… two people who googled… “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill… social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like. This is the filter bubble–being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with….

Eduardo Graells-Garrido … Mounia Lalmas and Daniel Quercia…. People may have opposing views on sensitive topics… [but] also share [other] interests… a recommendation engine that points these kinds of people towards each other…. The result is that individuals are exposed to a much wider range of opinions, ideas and people than they would otherwise experience…. “We conclude that an indirect approach to connecting people with opposing views has great potential,” say Graells-Garrido and co.

Indeed, to preserve a functioning public sphere requires overlapping communities of interest and alliance on a number of different and distinct issues. When foreign-policy doves are not the same as economic-policy tax-raisers are not the same thing as domestic-policy advocates of the taking-down of gender barriers, you can have a discourse and the dialogue. And then what Josiah Ober describes as the principal advantage of democracy can come into play: that it allows the consideration of all good ideas, rather than just those that come from the one or the few of sufficient status to be heard.

So how to create and nurture overlapping communities of interest and cross-cutting alliances on different issue areas? The standard argument is that such a functional public sphere was easier to construct back in the days when there were a great many northerners who–of different political and policy views and material and ideal interests otherwise–were for racial equality and would always vote Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves, and thus acquire some allies on those issues who they would talk to on other issues; and when there were a great many southerners who–of different political and policy views and material and ideal interests otherwise–were for racial inequality and would always vote Democratic because Lincoln freed the slaves, and thus acquire some allies on those issues who they would also talk to on other issues. Those of plutocratic tendency who placed racial inequality first would thus acquire leveling allies that they would listen to. And those of leveling tendency who placed racial equality first would thus acquire plutocratic allies who they would listen to.

One alternative view is that the source of the sea-change was not the taking of steps toward ending Jim Crow but rather the rapid rise in income and wealth inequality that greatly raised the stakes, and made the plutocracy-leveling cleavage orders of magnitude more important than any other one. A third view is that it was the decline of discrete industrial interests–of the post-WWI pattern identified by Charles Maier in which workers, managers, and owners in specific sectors found their concrete political interest in their sector to be much more important on the ground than their interest as members of a class.

At the individual level, the best cure is, my opinion, an absolutely ruthless marking-of-one’s-beliefs-to-market: at least every six months, spend a serious day asking yourself (i) what has surprised you in the past six months, (ii) who six months ago was predicting what came to you as a surprise, and (iii) what other views they hold that you do not you should now treat with more respect? Do those, and I assure you that you will find yourself a much smarter human in three years than you are now or would be otherwise.

Collective and organizational level, the way forward seems to be to construct organizations that are small-scale and issue-specific: organizations meant to build coalitions and draw lines against adversaries but that are explicitly not totalizing–that presume that all adversarial relationships are temporary, and that bygones will be bygones as soon as one particular issue is dealt with.

Hence the Washington Center for Equitable Growth to deal with one and only one complex of issues…

And I think this is one reason why Republican totalizing opposition to Obamacare is so damaging for American politics and policymaking–sets in concrete Republican and conservative opposition to policies that they may well want to adopt in five or 10 years as their own…

828 words :: December 31, 2013