SCN: Group polarization

[patrick]

Good article. Thought-provoking. 

Just the thing to stimulate thought and discussion.

Patrick

--- Steve <steve at advocate.net> wrote:
> x-no-archive: yes
> 
> ==========================
> 
> 
> (Alexander Stille, NY Times)---As Cass Sunstein, a professor of law 
> at the University of Chicago, saw himself being skewered on various 
> Web sites discussing his recent book, "Republic.com," he had the 
> odd satisfaction of watching some of the book's themes unfold 
> before his eyes. On the conservative Web site "FreeRepublic.com," 
> the discussion began by referring relatively mildly to Mr. Sunstein's 
> book about the political consequences of the Internet as "thinly 
> veiled liberal." But as the discussion picked up steam, the rhetoric 
> of the respondents, who insisted that they had not and would not 
> read the book itself, became more heated. Eventually, they were 
> referring to Mr. Sunstein as "a nazi" and a "pointy headed socialist 
> windbag."   
> 
> The discussion illustrated the phenomenon that Mr. Sunstein and 
> various social scientists have called "group polarization" in which 
> like-minded people in an isolated group reinforce one another's 
> views, which then harden into more extreme positions. Even one of 
> his critics on the site acknowledged the shift. "Amazingly enough," 
> he wrote, "it looks like Sunstein has polarized this group into 
> unanimous agreement about him." An expletive followed.   
> 
> To Mr. Sunstein, such polarization is just one of the negative 
> political effects of the Internet, which allows people to filter out 
> unwanted information, tailor their own news and congregate at 
> specialized Web sites that closely reflect their own views. A "shared 
> culture," which results partly from exposure to a wide range of 
> opinion, is important for a functioning democracy, he argues. But as 
> the role of newspapers and television news diminishes, he wrote, 
> "and the customization of our communications universe increases, 
> society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger 
> of dissolving."   
> 
> This pessimistic assessment is a sign of just how sharply scholarly 
> thinking about the Web has shifted. In its first years, the Internet 
> was seen euphorically as one of history's greatest engines of 
> democracy, a kind of national town hall meeting in which everyone 
> got to speak. As an early guru of cyberspace, Dave Clark of M.I.T., 
> put it in 1992: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe 
> in: rough consensus and running code."   
> 
> Now, with the examples of business and government control offered 
> by the explosion of Web commerce, the merger of America Online 
> and Time-Warner, the Microsoft antitrust case and the litigation over 
> Napster, that is no longer the case.   
> 
> Andrew Shapiro, a guest lecturer at Yale Law School and the author 
> of "The Control Revolution," said that the early euphoria over 
> cyberspace had been replaced "by a kind of 'technorealism,' a 
> second generation of Internet books" that are much more critical.   
> 
> An example is the 1999 book "Code" by Lawrence Lessig, a law 
> professor at Stanford University, who argues that the enormous 
> amount of personal information people reveal when they shop 
> online, browse Web sites or call up information offers extraordinary 
> opportunities for both governments and businesses to control their 
> lives. "Left to itself," he wrote, "cyberspace will become a perfect 
> tool of control."   
> 
> Mr. Sunstein's assessment is somewhat different from Mr. Lessig's, 
> though still negative. "His is closer to Orwell's '1984'; mine is more 
> like 'Brave New World,' " Mr. Sunstein explained. If to Mr. Lessig he 
> danger is government or corporate control, to Mr. Sunstein it is a 
> world of seemingly infinite choice, where citizens are transformed 
> into consumers and a common political life is eroded.   
> 
> Both agree, however, that society must begin to make more 
> conscious choices about what it wants the Internet to be. Mr. 
> Lessig's main point in "Code" is that the Internet does not have a 
> "nature." The world we think of as "cyberspace," he said, is an 
> environment created by the architecture of the computer code that 
> gave birth to the World Wide Web.   
> 
> Mr. Lessig's point is that because the Internet is based on "open 
> source" computer protocols that allow anyone to tap into it, it has a 
> specific character that can be, and is, modified all the time. Internet 
> providers can write software to allow users maximum privacy or to 
> track and restrict their movements to an extraordinary degree. The 
> software engineers, as Percy Bysshe Shelley said of poets, are the 
> unacknowledged legislators of our time. We must, Mr. Lessig said, 
> acknowledge this reality and try to shape it.   
> 
> "We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values 
> that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or 
> code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear," he writes.   
> 
> Mr. Shapiro describes himself as more optimistic than Mr. Lessig or 
> Mr. Sunstein. "I came to see more potential in the Internet 
> empowering individuals, but we are all 'technorealists' in that we 
> see personalization and social fragmentation as features of the 
> Net."   
> 
> Other legal scholars agree that fragmentation and polarization have 
> increased with the Internet, but they do not necessarily see it as a 
> problem. "I do not mourn the demise of the domination of the main 
> outlets of news and information," said Peter Huber, a conservative 
> legal scholar who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the 
> author of "Law and Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the F.C.C. and 
> Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm." "It's true that the oracles of 
> traditional authority, The New York Times, the network news and the 
> universities have lost power. Just look at the declining market share 
> of the major TV networks. But whether you regard that as good or 
> bad depends on where you sit."   
> 
> That doesn't mean he dismisses claims that new technology causes 
> social fragmentation; he just feels that the individual empowerment 
> of the Internet is well worth the price. "The Soviet Union had a 
> 'shared culture' and one source of information, 'Pravda,' " he said. "I 
> think it's impossible to judge what is the exact point at which you 
> have the right mix of diversity and common culture."   
> 
> Mr. Sunstein said he was not talking about limiting diversity but 
> rather the insular way that most sites were structured. For example, 
> he said, most political Web sites have links only to other like-
> minded sites. Although he stops short of calling for government 
> intervention, he says, "We might want to consider the possibility of 
> ways of requiring or encouraging sites to link to opposing 
> viewpoints."   
> 
> Until the early 1980's, the Federal Communications Commission 
> required broadcasters to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints, 
> a policy eliminated during the Reagan administration. When critics 
> of Mr. Sunstein's book pointed out that his own site at the University 
> of Chicago offered no such links, he responded by including the 
> Web addresses of two well-known conservative colleagues.   
> 
> What some political Web sites are already trying to do is figure out 
> ways to encourage more intelligent deliberation rather than simply 
> name-calling and insults.   
> 
> "We are trying to design sites so that they promote diversity as well 
> as a sense of community," said Scott Reents, the president of two 
> political Web sites called E-ThePeople and Quorum.org that recently 
> merged.   
> 
> The software design of the sites, Mr. Reents said in support of Mr. 
> Lessig's point, can shape discussion in important ways. For 
> example, at Quorum.org readers are asked to give a thumbs up or 
> thumbs down to a particular posting; that item's placement is 
> determined by reader reaction. (The site tries to prevent people 
> using multiple identities from voting more than once by requiring 
> visitors to register.)   
> 
> On other sites, a group of regular users rank the value of 
> contributions, and the rankings then determines their place on the 
> "bulletin board." How well that works, however, is an open question. 
> When Mr. Sunstein tried to intervene in a discussion of his own 
> book on a techie Web site called slashdot.org, his contribution was 
> given a very low ranking. "I think maybe they didn't believe I was 
> the author of the book," he said.   
> 
> James Fishkin, a political scientist at the University of Texas, said 
> that such efforts at Web democracy follow the model of debate in 
> ancient Sparta called the Shout. "The idea of the Shout is that the 
> candidate that got the loudest applause or shout would win," he 
> said. "Unless we make special efforts to implement more ambitious 
> democratic possibilities, the Internet, left to its own devices, is 
> going to give us an impoverished form of democracy in the form of 
> the Shout."   
> 
> Mr. Fishkin is trying to follow the example of ancient Athens, whose 
> assemblies consisted of several hundred citizens who, after being 
> chosen by lot, would deliberate and vote. He has developed a 
> technique called "deliberative polling" and would like to bring the 
> idea to the Internet. "The idea is this," he said. "What would public 
> opinion be like if people were motivated to behave more like ideal 
> citizens, if they had access to a wealth of information and to 
> competing arguments on a given issue?"   
> 
> Over the last decade Mr. Fishkin has collected a random group of 
> several hundred people and given them carefully prepared briefing 
> documents on both sides of a given issue. Participants question 
> panels of experts and discuss the issues in smaller groups with 
> trained moderators so that no single person is allowed to dominate 
> discussion. After their deliberation, they are then surveyed privately 
> as in any opinion poll, but their views now reflect, it is hoped, 
> careful deliberation. Texas actually used the method to help 
> determine its energy policy, holding a series of deliberative polls 
> between 1996 and 1998. "Because of it, there are now windmills all 
> over the state of Texas," Mr. Fishkin says.   
> 
> Mr. Fishkin is hoping to use the Internet to conduct "deliberative 
> polling" on a much larger basis. To Mr. Lessig, deliberative polling 
> is one of the few hopeful developments when it comes the 
> democracy and the Web. "If Jim can transfer to cyberspace what he 
> has done in real space, I think the Internet could be very different," 
> he said.   
> 
> Yet some view efforts to tame the Internet as doomed to failure. "I 
> think it's a waste of time," said Mr. Huber. "All this talk about `links' 
> and so forth is interesting intellectually, but by the time you try to 
> implement it the technology will be 10 years ahead. When online 
> video becomes as accessible as e-mail, the whole game will change 
> again. And if you think there is fragmentation now, you ain't seen 
> nothing yet."   
> 
> Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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