{"id":171,"date":"2003-01-06T22:58:25","date_gmt":"2003-01-07T03:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=171"},"modified":"2003-01-06T22:58:25","modified_gmt":"2003-01-07T03:58:25","slug":"is-the-daily-me-at-the-doorstep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=171","title":{"rendered":"Is the “daily me” at the doorstep?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the mid-90s, as internet adoption picked up steam, Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT media lab used to talk about the “daily me.”
\nIndividuals would be able to create personalized filters to view a newspaper that contained only the articles they wanted to read. Social critics worried that the “Daily Me” would be the death of democracy. They argued that that this lead to a world where people lived in their own bubbles, only seeing the information that confirmed their own prejudices.
\nThat world may have arrived. Valdis Krebs, who consults about social networks for a living, did some interesting analysis on link patterns in the “people who read this book also read” recommendation engine on Amazon.com.
\nHe started with a single book that he was looking up on a recommendation, The Silent Takeover<\/a>, and traced that patterns of recommendation that surrounded it.
\nHere’s a link to the pattern<\/a> he discovered. There’s a set of books that seem to represent “left-wing” readers, with titles by Chomsky and Michael Moore and Tom Friedman. And there’s a parallel set of books that seem to represent “right-wing” interests, with books by writers including Ann Coulter and Patrick Buchanan.
\nThe clusters of recommendations seemed to be mutually exclusive. Only one book appeared on recommendation lists in both clusters: What Went Wrong<\/a>, a book by Bernard Lewis about Middle East history.
\nDoes this mean that we’ve arrived in the world Negroponte saw in his crystal ball? In Valdis’ words, “once the propoganda gets into the echo chamber, you hear the same message continuously from many different sources, and you begin to believe that is how the world works.”
\nValdis’ research isn’t conclusive proof. The methodology he followed was “snowball sampling”, as it’s called in network analysis circles. The links were selected by browsing, following a near-infinite set of links in for a finite amount of time.
\nIt would be fascinating to do similar analysis with a larger data set, to create a more conclusive result. (Dear readers with a statistical background, I would welcome your thoughts about how to know whether the result is reliable).
\nIf a search of Amazon’s entire virtual bookshelf revealed the same result, what would it mean?
\nIt doesn’t tell us whether society has gotten MORE polarized than in the past; history is full of divisive partisan politics.
\nAnd it only tells us that the self-selected group of people who read political books have polarized opinions. We know that less than half of the eligible population votes. Most people tune out of political conversations.
\nAs Valdis said by email, “The challenge is to create *bridges* so that diverse information and ideas can be exchanged (not just via hollering and arguing).”
\nWe need to create a conversation where more people are talking and more people are listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the mid-90s, as internet adoption picked up steam, Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT media lab used to talk about the “daily me.” Individuals would be able to create personalized filters to view a newspaper that contained only the articles they wanted to read. Social critics worried that the “Daily Me” would be the death … Continue reading “Is the “daily me” at the doorstep?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-2L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}