I’ve been playing with Google’s webmaster central for Infovegan.com and found paper.li to be one of the sites that link to Infovegan.com the most. It’s a site that aggregates a Twitter user’s feed into a daily newspaper.
I checked it out and made my own paper. Perhaps it was just the newspaper metaphor, but when I took a look at my own paper, it looks like a left-wing crazy town.
Take a look at my paper. If my paper were an actual newspaper, people would be outraged at the level of blatant bias in the reporting. And of course, most of my twitter friends and followers aren’t journalists— it’s not like I’m going to ask my friend Karl Frisch to stop trying to advance his cause of holding Fox News accountable. Plus, @karlfrisch tweets out gems like this.
My background makes it so most of my colleagues are left-of-center activists, so I’m probably on the upper edge of this problem. Eli Pariser points out the problem too. If I’m surrounding myself with this information, I’m bound to be trapped inside a partisan echo chamber.
It’s mutual intellectual sycophanticide. Tools like Facebook and Twitter allow us to not only get constant updates from our friends, but also constant affirmations of our beliefs. Political information is only one type of information that can have bias attached to it — I’m sure Ford enthusiasts may not get a lot of positive Chevy information in their Twitter streams and creationists probably don’t see a lot of positive reviews of Charles Darwin popping up. Even if you consider yourself a non-partisan, you probably have bias in your network around something.
The problem is, without challenge and intellectual competition, our beliefs stray further from reality. They become more intellectually lazy or dishonest. The key part of the socratic method is the part where people disagree.
I’m not suggesting that, to solve this problem, you delete your Facebook and Twitter accounts and go live in a hole. Rather my advice is that you work to find smart people to follow in these new services that may challenge your beliefs and patience. Like comfort food, information that makes you too comfortable clogs those cognitive pipes.
Affirmation is good, but only with a healthy dose of challenge. Look for the tweets that make you comfortable. The ones that you agree with— where you say “oh thank goodness someone else thinks that way.” That’s where you’ll find your bias in your network. Conscious consumption of that kind of information, and adding diversity to your information diet will take you a long way, even amongst your social network connections.
It's worth mentioning that Eli Pariser's talk on Filter Bubbles is what got my brain churning on this.