[1] Garrett, R. Kelly. “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14.2 (2009): 265-285.
[2] Resnick, Paul, et al. “Bursting your (filter) bubble: strategies for promoting diverse exposure.” Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work companion. ACM, 2013.
This week’s papers study and discuss the Filter Bubble effect – the idea that people are only exposing themselves to viewpoints they agree with, to the detriment of obtaining diverse viewpoints. This effect is especially prominent when it comes to reading political news. The first paper studies the reading habits of users of partisan news sites. From their results, they could conclude that the desire to seek out news that reinforces one’s own opinions does not necessarily mean that one goes out of their way to avoid challenges to their opinions. In fact, they found that people engage more with the opposing views, perhaps to try and find flaws in the arguments and reinforce their own views. The second paper is a discussion by multiple authors on strategies for decreasing the filter bubble effect such as gamifying the news reading, encouraging the users to make lists of pros and cons on issues they read, having the news sources push through opposing views if the content is high quality, etc.
The first paper’s findings that people don’t actively avoid stories that challenge their opinions very interesting to me. It means that in most cases people are willing to engage opposing opinions even if they don’t necessarily agree with them. Big internet companies that rely on providing personalization could safely tweak their recommendation algorithms at least a bit to allow some opposing views to filter through without the fear of losing business, which may have been a concern for them.
Something I would like to know, that the first paper didn’t cover is how much are the people comprehending the stories and how much does it influence them? For opinion reinforcing stories, are they tuning out once they realize that the story agrees with their opinions? For opinion opposing stories, are they spending that excess time trying to understand and does that extra engagement lead to at least a shift in their opinion from compared to their earlier stance? Perhaps this study could be done with a final quiz that asks questions about the story content and also interviews to measure if there has been a shift in their opinion.
The idea of gamifying the task of getting a person to reduce their selective exposure, through the use of a stick figure balancing on a tightrope discussed in the second paper, is a very promising idea. Stack Overflow thrives with an enormous amount of content because they have gamified answering questions. You can earn different levels of badges and that gives you prestige. Perhaps the same thing can be done to encourage people to read more widely by giving them points and badges and have a leaderboard tracking the scores across the country. People actively chase the high of getting better scores which is why I think that this might be fairly effective. Of course, you don’t want people to game the game so maybe this gamification could be combined with the other ideas in the paper of having people discuss and interact and rate the comments to prevent botting the game.
