Republic.com 2.0 Part One

press.princeton.edu

Cass R. Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0 explores into our era of personalization and filtering. Technology has enabled our abilities to focus solely on our interests and nothing else. A modern day example of filtering would be Sunstein’s example, “The Daily Me” where people can restrict themselves to their own preferred points of view. Extreme filtering can cause only one point of view, more formally known as information cocoons. This is then followed by the “echo chamber effect” where people only create and navigate online spaces that reinforce their preferred world-view. These two things can threaten our democratic world.

People need to see new point of views, opinions, and subjects that they wouldn’t have thought about before so we are not so narrow-minded. General-interest intermediaries involve shared experiences with diversities, and expose people to materials and topics that they did not seek out beforehand. Examples of general-interest intermediaries include: newspapers, TV broadcasts, and magazines. However, these are on the decline because people can filter out what news they want to read, hear, or see on the Internet. I believe there has to a need for general-interest intermediaries because we need diverse opinions and more open minds. If everyone thought the same, it would even encourage governments to control and censor new and emerging ideas.

Sunstein argues that the decline in general-interest intermediaries has led to an increase in polarization. Using politics as an example, he provides studies that show that conservatives tend to embrace Fox News and shy away from CNN and NPR while liberals go out of their way to avoid Fox News and are more inclined to watch CNN or listen to NPR. He also points out that conservative sites increasingly link only to other conservative sites and less to liberal sites. The same trend is true of liberal sites. This creates a polarization effect because people hear views that reinforce their own beliefs and denigrate the other point of view.
In a vacuum, Sunstein has a point. If you only visited liberal sites on the internet as a liberal, obviously your liberal ideas would be reinforced. However, I think that he is looking at this too specifically. Even if, among political sites, I only follow liberal sites I still have other interests. On a sports blog I might encounter strong conservatives and we might end up engaged in a political debate in the message board. His theory works on the assumption that people only have one specific interest, not that they have a plurality of interests that intersect and cause a meeting of different points of view.

Sunstein worries that eventually society will fragment to the point that becomes decentralized. He reacts skeptically to the notion that these fragments will work as a network. Sunstein sees an extreme where there are more “echo chambers” than actual conversations. He acknowledges that “the current situation is hardly worse than what preceded it; on the contrary, it is much better, if only because of the increase in the number and range of the voices.” However, he seems more concerned with presenting an apocalyptic version of the internet where everyone is an extremist or becoming an extremist.

I think however, Sunstein accurately notes our responsibilities as citizens. He maintains that an informed citizen is most important to a democracy. He points to the growing number of options and says it is very easy to only pick those that agree with the options that are most comfortable. However, it is important for citizens to try to seek out other options to reach informed decisions.

A blog is created every 2.2 seconds as of present day. Finding a blog is extremely simple because there are millions of blogs about anything and everything. Blogs can contain a lot of information as it assembles sources from many different sources, like a general-interest intermediary. But some blogs can filter their sources that only support their point of view, which goes back to the information cocoon as it falls back into the echo chamber. Unfortunately then, bloggers are supporting their own biases. Another problem that arises in the blogosphere is the blogger’s credibility. When a blogger does not have much credibility they are unlikely to object to exaggerations and falsehoods that appeal to the prejudices of their target audiences (143). I believe blogs should always study the opposite point-of-view to eliminate such huge biases. Blogs, like people living in a heterogeneous society should be fair-minded in the ways they present themselves and their points of view.