Papers :
[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.
Summary :
In the first paper, Garrett addresses the presence of echo chambers on our social media feeds. It studies exposure among online news readers motivated by political opinions. The paper describes the effect of opinion reinforcement and opinion challenging on exposure of online news as well as the read time for each article depending on the content of each article.
In the second paper, Resnick et al deal with strategies to curb the effects of the said echo chambers in social media feeds by introducing the concept of news aggregators and subtle nudges to users. It describes approaches such as ‘ConsiderIt’, ‘Reflect’, ‘OpinionSpace’ as mediums to do so.
Reflection :
The question which arises is the safety of the user data obtained, which contains the opinions of participants and how favourable they are to the reinforcement or challenge of a particular topic.
The topics of both the topic take me to my idea of the project proposal. News Aggregators seem really utile, harmless and subtle ways of curbing the Echo Chamber Effect on online platforms. Opinion Grouping could be performed to group articles and posts with similar interests and opinions into concise blocks (which can be expanded to the normal view on demand) Thus, the concise view clubs multiple posts and articles of the same majority opinion held by the user, thereby leaving space for contrary minority opinions causing opinion challenge. This way average users get balanced opinions about the subject at hand and yet be able to scrutinize more on any opinion that they agree with or disagree with. A FeedViz like interface can be developed to solve the problem and compare which approach leads to a more informed user.
One would think that users would spend more time on opinion reinforcement, but opinion challenging articles also get more read time if the user clicks on the article even once. This is because opinion challenging articles make a user scrutinize more and dig deeper to find flaws.
