Month: March 2017

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Bursting the filter bubble

image by Jordi Boixareu (Flickr)

A recent article in the NY Times addressed the issue of the notorious filter bubble in social media, namely the phenomenon that we tend to be served up by Facebook and other services the stories that contain the same points of views as items we have liked in the past, thus reinforcing the views and beliefs we already hold. In that way, we tend not to be exposed to opposing points of view or alterative takes on issues. This has been much in the news since the US presidential election, with many stories about the viral spread of fake news stories within Facebook and other online communities. Given the media coverage about the filter bubble, interest has developed, at least in some folks, about how one might break out of it, in order to gain some insight into the other side. The Times articles points to tools and sites which let users see to what extent they might be trapped in a filter bubble. The Chrome browser extension, PolitEcho, for example, lets you “find out how polarizing the content on your news feed is”:

PolitEcho shows you the political biases of your Facebook friends and news feed. The app assigns each of your friends a score based on our prediction of their political leanings then displays a graph of your friend list. Then it calculates the political bias in the content of your news feed and compares it with the bias of your friends list to highlight possible differences between the two.

Similarly, NPR has made available a quiz, which purports to show if “you live in a bubble”. The first question is “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your 50 nearest neighbors did not have college degrees?”. The article also discusses “other tech products invite us to reach out and understand other people without the hassle of actually talking to the”, such as a Twitter plug-in that replaces your regular Twitter feed with “that of a random, anonymous user of a different political persuasion” or an iPhone app which makes a game out of changing color (red or blue) depending on the political bent of the news source you are reading.

A number of other sites and tools are listed in the article. The author points to the irony of many of the suggestions coming from the very sources that are responsible for the filter bubble: “A cynical impulse lies behind many of these kumbaya vibes. The same social media networks that helped build the bubbles are now being framed as the solution, with just a few surface tweaks.” That is especially the case with Faceboook. Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, famously claimed after the election that it was a “crazy idea” that the fake news stories on Facebook could have influenced the election. That, despite the fact that a Pew study has shown that 62 percent of Americans get their news from social media, with of course the big player being Facebook. Facebook did subsequently take some measures, using third-party fact-checkers and giving users the ability to manually report fake news. More recently, Zuckerberg has significantly changed his tune, releasing a manifesto, Building Global Community, in which he claims for Facebook a central role in making the world better by exposing us to new ideas and different perspectives. It remains to be seen to what extent that means a change in how Facebook news is delivered.

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Rejecting likeability

By Slowking - Own work, GFDL 1.2

Chimamanda Adichie by Slowking

The Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, has published a new novel, Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions. The book was written after a friend asked for advice about how to raise her newborn daughter to be a feminist. In an interview on NPR, Adichie talked about some of the 15 suggestions in the book.

On “feminism lite”, the idea of conditional female equality:

“It means raising a girl to believe that she is inferior to a man but that the man is expected to be good to her, that women are somehow naturally subordinate to men but men have to treat women well. And I find it dehumanizing to women because I think that surely we have to have something more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman’s well-being.”

On teaching difference:

“I think it’s important to just say to kids, look; the norm of our existence as human beings is difference. We’re not all the same, and it’s OK.”

On girls rejecting likeability:

“I think the way that a lot of girls are raised in so many parts of the world is that idea that you have to be likable. And likable means you have to kind of mold and shape what you do and say based on what you imagine the other person wants to hear. And I think instead, we should teach girls to just be themselves and that idea that you don’t have to be liked by everyone.”

That last point is an interesting take on a communication style associated by Adichie with women, but often seen as part and parcel of an indirect or implicit The idea is that in high context communications, often seen as characteristic of Asian cultures, one tends to use means beyond explicit language to guide what one says, using knowledge about the interlocutor’s social status, for example. Part of that process is taking into consideration the possible reception of what you say on your conversation partner, gauging that reception by observing body language and other indicators. In Western cultures generally, that kind of communication style is indeed more associated with women than men. Women are seen as being more observant and better listeners, making them more adept at sensing what the other person is feeling. The danger Adichie sees here for women is that using this approach to conversing leads women to adopt a persona which hides their real selves.

Adichie is not alone in this view, encouraging women not to see being “nice” as a guide to their behavior. The reaction to the “nasty woman” description of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump led both to a call for solidarity among women, but also to a celebration of the right of women to assert their own personalities.