- Garrett, R. Kelly. “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication2 (2009): 265-285.
- Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.” Science6239 (2015): 1130-1132.
Both papers talk about how the exposure to news and the civic information is increasing through online social networks and personalization. The emphasis is more on how this is leading to an era of “echo chambers” where people read news or information which favors their ideology and opinions.
Garrett et al. demonstrated that opinion-reinforcing information promotes news story exposure while opinion-challenging information makes exposure only marginally less likely. They conducted a controlled study where the participants were presented with news content and a questionnaire. However, I am not convinced by the fact that the participants were presented with the kind of news or information they already have strong opinions about. This could have led to a possible bias in the conclusion drawn from the study. Although the paper has presented some interesting findings of opinion-reinforcing and opinion-challenging content and how readers perceive information when presented with such content, I was unable to correlate the claims and findings specified by the authors. Also, the study revolves around three issues – gay marriage, social security reform, and civil liberties- which were current topics in 2004. Does this mean that the results presented won’t generalize to other topics? Of all the papers we have read so far, generalizing the results across genres and other geographic location looks like a major roadblock.
Bakshy et al., have used deidentified data to examine how 10.1 million Facebook users interact with socially shared news. Their focus is on identifying how heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to cross-cutting content. Apart from “echo chambers” the authors also talk about “filter bubbles” in which the content is selected by algorithms according to viewer’s previous behaviors. I like the quantitative analysis presented by the authors to compare and quantify the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked Newsfeed. Apart from this, in my opinion “how likely is it that an individual will share a cross-cutting post with his friends” should also be considered and “what if an individual doesn’t click on the link containing a cross-cutting post?”
In the end, it makes me wonder how the results will be if authors of both papers would have conducted the study on individuals from outside of the US.
