Readings:
[1] Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users
Summary:
This paper studies the widely known echo chamber phenomenon. In order to carry out his experiment the author of the paper recruited subjects from readership of two different online news sites — which supported either sides of the aisle. The big question that the author was trying to address was: are people more likely to read news that supports their opinion/belief, or do people actively try to avoid news that challenges their opinion? In order to answer the big question, he made five different hypothesis, and proved them right using results from his experiment. The five hypothesis were:
- The more opinion-reinforcing information an individual expects a news story to contain, the more likely he or she is to look at it.
- The more opinion-reinforcing information a news story contains, the more time an individual will spend viewing it.
- The more opinion-challenging information the reader expects a news story to contain, the less likely he or she is to look at it.
- The influence of opinion-challenging information on the decision to look at a news story will be smaller than the influence of opinion-reinforcing information.
- The more opinion-challenging information a news story contains, the more time the individual will spend viewing it.
Subjects recruited for the study were not indicative of the larger US demography, howbeit the recruits from the two news sites shared various demographic similarities — hence making it possible for the author to make the generalizations and prove his hypothesis correct.
Reflection/Questions:
Whilst reading the paper I stumbled across a certain statistical number and it stood out to me — more than 85% participants were white. The immediate question I had in mind was what could be the reason for a majority white representation? More access to technology? Widespread access to education, resulting in higher interest levels in news ? The previous question was followed by how would the study be affected if the race of the participants was more diverse and more equally distributed ? This particular paper and all the other papers that I have read in this class discuss the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers, which talk about what kind of news do people consume and do they get enough exposure to opposing ideas — but this assumes a single topic(same topic on both sides); reading this paper made me interested in understanding how to deliver different news topics that people might not get exposure to because of all the different filters in online platforms. For instance someone might be reading both sides of news for gun control, but that same person might be so immersed in gun control, that he might not pay attention to poverty.
There are three more interesting ideas that I got from this paper :
- Exposure to how many opinion-challenging news articles would it take, either consecutively or in a very short interval, before the reader disregards the source entirely; consequentially not revisiting that source ? (title of the article)
- When reading an opinion-challenging article, what kind of credibility does the reader ascribe to the source ? and how does the perceived credibility of the source affect the comprehension of the news article that the reader is reading ? (source of the article)
- How do people react to different treatments of their views in an opinion-challenging article, and how does this impact their future take on opposing news ? (content of the article)
I think all three of these questions are very important for designing a platform where the user is exposed to opinion-challenging news in a positive manner, without being driven away or becoming resentful towards opinion-challenging news. In fact, answers to these questions might help researchers and designers in creating a platform that promotes readers to read opinion-challenging news.
[2 ] Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure
Summary:
This paper talks about possibly nudging people towards a more diverse exposure to news articles. The authors discourse two different possibilities of nudging people:
- Diversity-aware news aggregators
- Provide subtle nudges to promote readers to choose more diverse news
After detailing different methods of nudging people, the authors move onto talk about various methods that promote processing information in a motivated manner. On this end, the authors further discuss three different platforms — Reflect, OpinionSpace, ConsiderIt — that have promoted more deliberate behavior by audience indulging in divergent opinion; in other words promoting empathy.
Reflection/Questions:
During the paper, the authors suggest that “news aggregator might set a higher quality threshold..”, but this only makes think that quality is an intrinsic property and is subjective, consequentially can’t be used as a measurable attribute. One thing that all three platforms(reflect, opinionspace , and considerit) have in common is that a user has to go through more rigorous interaction with the platform, for the platforms intended operation to be meaningful — for instance ConsiderIt has its users create a pros-cons list. Not everyone has this kind of patience and/or time, so one question that I ask myself is: how can we design a platform that is not as time intensive, but still engages readers (of opposing ideologies) in a more deliberate fashion?
