I wrote this post back on February 27, 2011, but decided to re-post it here as the talk of echo-chambers is once again showing up in various articles and blogs. This was an expanded version of what I said at AAAS meeting in Washington DC and the original post (see the link) contains a longish intro, providing some more context, which I decided to cut out of the post here.


Social norms build and enforce echo-chambers




In a small tightly-knit community where everyone's politics and religion are the same (and people tend to move to such places in order to feel comfortable, on top of most likely being born in such a community to begin with), there is no need to discuss these topics as everyone already agrees. If the topic is discussed, there are no other opinions to be heard - it's just back-slapping and commiserating about the evil enemies out there.



Mass media builds and enforces echo-chambers


But it is even worse than that - the choice is really not as broad. The media shapes the public opinion by choosing what is and what is not respectable opinion, i.e., 'sphere of legitimate debate' - what opinions to cover as serious, what opinions to denigrate and what opinions to ignore. There are many ideas that people hold that you will never see even mentioned in the US mass media and some of those are actually very legitimate in the Real World.

Furthermore, the press then divides the 'respectable opinion' into two opposites, gives voice to each of the two, and will never actually tell you which of the two is more reasonable than the other - "we report, you decide", aka, He Said She Said journalism.

By presenting every issue as a battle between two extremes (and the fuzzy, undefinable "middle" is reserved only for them, the wise men), the mainstream press makes every opinion something to be sneered at, both those they deem worthy of mentioning and the unmentionable ones.


The Web breaks echo-chambers


The usual first response is anger and strenuous attempts at countering all other ideas and pushing one's own.

But after a while, unbeknown to the person, all those various novel ideas start seeping in. One is not even aware of changing one's own mind from one year to the next. Many ideas take time to process and digest and may quietly get incorporated into one's gradually enriching and more sophisticated worldview.



Your Facebook friends will post stuff that reveals their politics is different than yours (and you did not even know that about them before - they seemed so nice in real life!). By the time you get around to blocking them...it's too late - the virus has already entered your head [this one sentence added 2-27-11].


If you are, for example, a liberal and tend to read only liberal blogs, you will constantly see links to conservative sites that are being debunked by your favourite bloggers - thus you will be exposed to conservative ideas daily.

If your interest is science, you are even luckier. The mainstream media, if it links to anything at all, tends to link either to each other or to governmental sources (e.g., CDC, USDA, etc.). Political bloggers link a lot more, but again the spectrum of sources is pretty narrow - they link to MSM, to governmental pages, and to each other (including the "opposition" bloggers).





Release of Tripoli 6 was an instance in which massive outpouring of support online (centered around now-defunct blog 'Effect Measure') forced the mainstream media to cover the story which then forced the hand of politicians to do something.


PRISM was an astroturf website built to counter the pro-open-access NIH bill in the US Senate. Outpouring of online anger at the tactics by the publishers' lobby inundated the senatorial offices - as a result the bill passed not once, but twice (GW Bush vetoed the first version of the large omnibus bill it was a part of, then signed it with no changes in the language on this particular issue) and the Senate is now educated on this issue.

But probably the best example is the Dover Trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) that made Intelligent Design Creationism illegal to teach in US public schools. The ruling by Judge Jones (pdf) is one of the most powerful texts in the history of judicial decisions I am aware of.

There are anti-evolution bills popping up somewhere in the country seemingly every week. But because of the Dover ruling, they are all illegal. Most don't make it to the committee, let alone to the floor of the state legislatures. Others are soundly defeated.

Before Dover, both Creationist sites and pro-evolution sites, when linking to me, would bring approximately the same amount of traffic to my blog. After Dover, getting a link from PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Larry Moran or Jerry Coyne brings substantial new traffic. Links from Creationist sites? Essentially undetectable by traffic trackers - I discover them only when I search my blog URL to specifically see if there are new links out there. Creationism, while still popular with many people, is politically essentially dead. The Dover ruling castrated it.

But Dover Trial would not have gone that way, and would not result in such a gorgeously written document by the Judge, if it was not for a small army of bloggers who contribute to the blog Panda's Thumb. A mix of scientists from different disciplines, lawyers, etc., this group has been online - first on Usenet, later on the blog - for a couple of decades before the trial.

This is a group of people who battled Creationists for many years, online and offline, in courtrooms and political campaigns, in classrooms and in print. They know all the characters, all the usual creationist "arguments" (and provided all the answers to them in one place), all the literature, etc.

It is one of them who discovered that the new Intelligent Design "textbook" is really just a reprint of an old Creationist book, in which the word "Creationists" was replaced by "Intelligent Design proponents" throughout the text....except in one place where they made a typo: "Cdesign proponentsists".

Ooops - a huge piece of evidence that Intelligent Design Creationism is just a warmed-up version of the old-style Creationism masquerading as something new. The Panda's Thumb bloggers were at the trial as expert witnesses who provided all the expert evidence that Judge Jones needed to make his decision. People who organized on the Web have helped a meatspace history come to pass.


When looking at the role of online communities and networks in meatspace events, counting the numbers of networked citizens (or ratio of networked to non-networked citizens) is not sufficient – one also needs to know their geographic distribution, and their connectedness with non-networked citizens. The most fresh example are the so-called "Twitter revolutions" in the Arab world.




In scenario 1, there are 10 buddies dreaming of revolution. In scenario 2, there are thousands of people in ten cities organizing revolution. In both, there are only 10 people on Twitter. Yet, the outcome is likely to be very different (I am aware that March 1991 demonstrations against Milosevic in Serbia were likewise coordinated by about a dozen people, well positioned around the city, who had email - most of us learned about the existence of email years later).


'Echo-chamber' is just a derogatory term for 'community'

I shamelessly stole this sub-heading from Chris Rowan on Twitter.


Before the Web, each atheist in the USA thought he or she was the only one in the country. The social norms about the impoliteness of discussing religion, as well as the real fear of reprisals by the religious neighbors, made atheism completely invisible. No need to mention that the media never mentioned them - they were outside of the "sphere of legitimate debate".

But then the Web happened, and people, often pseudonymously, revealed their religious doubts online. Suddenly they realized they are not alone - there are millions of atheists in the country, each closeted before, each openly so after! It is not a surprise that "no belief" is the fastest-growing self-description in questions about religion in various nation-wide polls and censuses.

President Bush Senior, himself not very religious, could say that atheists are not real American citizens. A decade later, his son G.W. Bush, himself a fundamentalist, could not say that any more - his speechwriters made sure he mentioned atheists in the listings of all the equally American religious groupings.


Without the Web, I would not know many people whose friendship I cherish. Without the Web I would not have this job. Without the Web, me and many of my friends would have never gone to a meeting like AAAS or ScienceWriters or WCSJ. There would be no such meetings as ScienceOnline, SpotOn London, SciBarCamp, SciFoo, and others.

Every time I travel I make sure that people I know online - from blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. - know I am traveling. I say on which date, at which time, I will be in which restaurant in which city. Twenty people show up. Most I have never met in real life before. But after sharing a meal, a beer, a handshake and a hug, our weak ties become strong ties. Superficial relationships become friendships. If there is a need to organize some real-world action - we can rely on each other to participate or help.



