Our Fragmented Web

I think Amy Harmon is a terrific writer, and she's done countless pieces over the years that have been dead right about the net and its social impact. But like Jeff Jarvis and a few others, I find this whole "the web is fragmenting society" argument completely infuriating. (I've been railing against it for almost a decade now, but I just can't help myself.) In this latest piece, it's just entirely taken as a given that the web is dropping us all into echo chambers where we can only hear like-minded voices. There are people quoted who disagree about what should be done with this phenomenon, but the underlying trend isn't questioned.

I find this to be one of those bizarro bits of conventional wisdom, where exactly the opposite is true. The reason we have so many filters and personalization tools is because the web has created a veritable Cambrian explosion of diversity, funneled directly to your home -- social, political, sexual, ethical, you name it. There are literally millions more points of view available to you today in your own home then there were fifteen years ago. We have filters because the web has unleashed so much diversity, not because we have too little.

Take this quote from Harmon's piece:

The Internet became the ultimate tool for finding like minds and blocking out others long before supporters of candidates began seeking one another out on Meetup.com. With online dating sites where searches can be tailored by age and income, e-mail forums for the most narrow band of subjects, bookmarked sites and even spam filters, the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium. Social scientists even have a term for it: cyberbalkanization.

Slow down and work through the logic here: spam filters are invoked as yet another indication of the echo-chamber effect. Now, who is winning right now: the spam or the filters? Obviously, the spam is winning -- nobody's walking around complaining that they miss the days when they'd get a completely spontaneous penis-enlargement ad in their inbox, despite the fact that they're opposed to penis-enlargement in general. The filters are there because there are so many voices flooding our inboxes and our browsers that we need tools to fight back. You don't have filters on television or old-fashioned newspapers because you don't need them -- there's not enough diversity and chaos to justify them. But the web -- and particularly the blogosphere -- is far more eclectic and cross-pollinating than any of those older media. That's the real story. Writing about the rise of filters as a sign of web insularity is like writing about the heat wave we're having here in New York right now because everyone's bundled up in parkas.

Comments

[Nicholas Barnard]

While I agree a majority of your argument, there is one correction I must make. We do have filters for TVs. They're called DVRs. My Tivo makes my television much more watchable, it keeps what I want and gets rid of the crap that I don't want to watch.

[Jaker]

Good blog, but you got lots of spam in your archives!

cheers,

JMM

[aaron wall]

While I believe most of your statements to be correct I think one thing that can take the idea in the wrong direction is SEARCH PERSONALIZATION. It will be hard to change ideas and ways of thinking if our main inroads to knowledge always transform to match what we thought was true in the past.

[Susan]

I suppose that one can get caught up in the whole web world to the extent that ones's life totally revolves around it. In fact... no supposition at all.. that does happen to lots of people.
But to say that the web is the cause or at the root of, 'fragmenting society' all by it's little lonesome, is just plain acting like Chicken Little or being an Ostrich with ones 'fraidy cat head in the sand.
Usually people who have no idea about the dynamics of people and the culture here on the web are the ones that protest the loudest and the longest. They just simply fail to understand.
Not only about web culture and all , but about people in general.
There are so many aspects to life, humans, friendships, communicating and ALL of the varying levels that make those up, that most (dare I say that????)folks just do not get. Kinds of friends, levels of love, mediums of communications, body language, the concise use of written language.... and on and on.
To use only one type of level in one's life, or thinking, or loving, or communicating is like putting only 1 finger of a glove on and expecting that to be the end all and be all of everything. Life is sooooooooo much more than being a 'mitten' (one finger of a glove) and the web is a part of that expansion now. And I absolutely LOVE IT!
Can't ignore the naysayers though, :( have to keep sloggin along, pursuing inovative ideals and processes, wishing the rest could even glimpse just a wee bit of the miracle that is unfolding.....and striving... always hoping that they could see... just a little bit..... what is really out there.. not only on the Web.. but in the varying levels of life too.
(yikes... perhaps this frigid -42F temp up here has got to me wee brain???)
Susan

[Brad Plumer]

Boston Review put out a whole forum's worth of good articles on this issue:

http://bostonreview.net/ndf.html#Internet

Worth a peek.

[Anna]

Although I'd like to agree with you, I believe this is one of those cases where introspection + induction != a clear perspective on humanity: you are a biased sample.

It's (partly) the liberal-conservative psychological differences, from http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml

You are lacking in:
Fear and aggression
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
Uncertainty avoidance
Need for cognitive closure
(etc)

I have to agree with David Brooks (also cited by the Peeps Like Us trackback poster), from before he got weird, at
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/09/brooks.htm
"[People] search for places to live on the basis of cultural affinity. Once they find a town in which people share their values, they flock there, and reinforce whatever was distinctive about the town in the first place."

As Brooks says, it's human nature. The question is, how can we structure our world so as not to give it free rein?

And - on bemoaning the ill effects of the web - change invariably provides subject material for bemoaners. About 10 years ago the NYTimes ran an article bemoaning the fact that the act of writing (as a form of interpersonal communication) was a dying art. This right before email came into wide use...

[Hamish MacEwan]

I'd agree with you, except this might provide grist for the mills of those who miss the point that with human beings, even amongst the most homogenous groupings, there is always vast disparity and diversity.

Do Conservatives never disagree with each other? Old people, white people, women, men, lesbians, etc. etc. all disagree... perhaps even more so because they might be more similar... sibling rivalry I'm told is the very worst.

SO the notion that there is this warm welcoming home for us all amongst the birds of our own feather is over stated.

And even the best searches and filters fail enough to give us the occasional serendipitous thrill where we find something we didn't know we'd like.

More choice, even the choice to have less choice, is better than less or no choice.

[Arlen Walker]

Let's follow the logic just a little farther, shall we?

This "Cambrian explosion of diversity" floods our email and web browsing. So we install filters to deal with it.

OK, I'm with you so far. But now what happens as a result of this barrage? We retreat inwards. We stop roaming the web looking for diversity, because we've already got a thousand sites in our bookmark list whose viewpoint resonates with our own. We stop reading email from people we don't know, because there are so many of them who have nothing worthwhile to offer (except penis enlargers, of course).

Our perspective gets narrower in part because the quanitity of voices who agree with us, validate our thoughts, support our opinions becomes so large that there is no longer time for those who do not.

Try this experiment: try to follow two or three separate conversations; now go find a loud crowd and see how many conversations you can actually follow. The noise of the chaff drowns out the wheat that might otherwise have challenged your mind.

[Lawrence]

Computer security recourse: [Secure Root]

[Joshua]

Computer security recourse: SecureRoot