A Re­pub­lic, If You Can Keep It

The Crisis of "Fake News"

Nic­co's class Media and Jour­nalism in the Dig­ital Age has as­sem­bled an am­bi­tious amount of ma­te­rial, but has cen­tered around "news", or per­haps a rapidly changing idea of what "news media" is... We talked about the ex­ten­sive woes of print news; yet it still man­ages to con­jure the most pow­erful image of News— or the ideals of a jour­nal­istic prac­tice.

No doubt The Post (the re­cent film) has sought to re­in­force that feeling.¹ It had Spiel­berg's classic cin­e­matic af­fect, but a healthy op­ti­mism for ethics in jour­nalism— es­pe­cially in par­allel with the "fake news" crisis. In class, we did touch upon the phys­ical speed at which printed news (de­spite those in­cred­ible whirring ma­chines!) lags be­hind dig­ital; but, I'm cu­rious about printed books as well...

There is cer­tainly some­thing to be gained from books— real, thick books— that prob­ably won't ever be found on the Web. But how often can I find a book that's re­ally as cut­ting and new as the ma­te­rial I read on­line? A book is spe­cial be­cause it or­ga­nizes in­for­ma­tion dif­fer­ently, and forces a com­mit­ment to ac­tu­ally sit down— to gather and re­in­force a co­herent set of ideas over the course of a few days, or weeks. But not al­ways— it's not easy to find a book that does well to be a book when we have the In­ternet. I'm sure that's some­thing the au­thor has to learn to un­der­stand and eval­uate, and pre­sents an in­ter­esting chal­lenge.

A Hy­brid Media En­vi­ron­ment

Any­ways, Cass Sun­stein did a won­derful job with #re­public, and it was a set of ideas that re­quired a good, size­able book.² I would say "fake news" isn't re­ally an ap­pro­priate or pop­ular name for the crisis, that it's more of a "crisis of freedom". Part of the analysis that Cass made con­veys a sense that dig­ital in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies (ICT) pri­marily create choice. We have a great many of choices today, and not enough are real— let alone par­tic­u­larly useful by way of de­lib­er­a­tive democ­racy.

Cass uses the pages well to re­veal and as­sess this crisis— with some valu­able, and sharply rel­e­vant ar­gu­ments and analyses on the same ex­press­edly "hy­brid" media en­vi­ron­ment David Karpf de­scribes in his book, An­a­lytic Ac­tivism: Dig­ital Lis­tening and the New Po­lit­ical Strategy.³ Karpf re­ally pro­vided a thor­ough in­tro­duc­tion into what is hap­pening in the realm of dig­ital ICTs, and Sun­stein lends a com­pli­men­tary ar­gu­ment— es­pe­cially in the func­tion of psy­chology and so­cial sci­ences— per­haps best sum­ma­rized here:

In gen­eral, it is pre­cisely the people most likely to filter out op­posing views who most need to hear them.⁴

On­line "Echo Cham­bers"

So­cial media has given democ­racy a whole new set of prob­lems— and fur­ther com­pli­cated some very old ones. Sun­stein pulls to­gether a number of studies that, in some cases, af­firm pre­vi­ously ob­served so­cial phe­nomena— but in a dig­ital space. The con­for­mity of a group has been doc­u­mented and ref­er­enced to ex­cess in the well-known study by Soloman Asch (1951-53), then at Swarth­more Col­lege.⁵ Asch dis­cov­ered that a staunch group with em­bedded prin­ci­ples could gen­erate sta­tis­ti­cally-sig­nif­i­cant so­cial pres­sure in in­flu­encing, or even al­tering, a single mem­ber's opin­ions— even when pro­vided with clear ev­i­dence dis­proving the group's be­liefs.

If you're un­fa­miliar with the ex­per­i­ment, here's a para­phrase: the sub­ject— as part of a larger group of con­fed­er­ates— was pre­sented with an image of three ver­tical lines of dif­fering length. They would then be given an­other card dis­playing a single line, and were asked to choose the cor­re­sponding line from the group of three which had the same length. The con­fed­er­ates were asked to pur­posely pick the wrong op­tion; and 37 of 50 par­tic­i­pants chose the pop­ular op­tion.

It's in­ter­esting to note that sim­ilar in­stances of so­cial pref­er­ence re­main con­sis­tent on­line. Sun­stein pro­vides a more re­cent (2006) ex­ample in a study car­ried out by Matthew Sal­ganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts. In the ex­per­i­ment, Ex­per­i­mental Study of In­equality and Un­pre­dictability in an Ar­ti­fi­cial Cul­tural Market, groups of people were asked to de­ter­mine their fa­vorite song from a cu­rated set of pre­vi­ously un­known music.⁶ Par­tic­i­pants were found to show a ten­dency to use the number of down­loads as a metric for quality.

Now, I know this isn't picking a 3 in. line when it def­i­nitely doesn't match the 4 in. one; but it's yet an­other way our de­ci­sions can be un­con­sciously in­flu­enced by how we per­ceive the choices of others. Ad­di­tion­ally, the In­equality and Un­pre­dictability study is some­what of a mis­nomer. Re­cent studies in the re-emer­gent field of net­work sci­ence are showing that this be­havior is trace­able in a number of com­plex sys­tems— known as pref­er­en­tial at­tach­ment. When new nodes enter a scale-free net­work, they're likely to build con­nec­tions with nodes ex­hibiting a higher de­gree (more con­nec­tivity).

Pref­er­en­tial At­tach­ment in Net­works

In the last post, looking at John Wi­h­bey's News in a Time of Fac­tual Re­ces­sion: Un­der­standing Net­worked Media and Pop­ulist Knowl­edge, I wrote more ex­plic­itly on the topic of net­work topolo­gies and their ob­serv­able be­hav­iors— like pref­er­en­tial at­tach­ment.⁷ Net­work sci­ence is com­bining with so­cial psy­chology in some fas­ci­nating ways be­cause of the Web and so­cial media.

How Real Spaces Af­fect Our Pol­i­tics

How­ever, per­haps with my back­ground in ar­chi­tec­ture, I ap­pre­ci­ated the "analog" ref­er­ence to Jane Ja­cob's The Death and Life of Great Amer­ican Cities in Sun­stein's in­tro­duc­tion:

It is pos­sible to be on ex­cel­lent side­walk terms with people who are very dif­ferent from one­self and even, as time passes, on fa­miliar public terms with them. Such re­la­tion­ships can, and do, en­dure for many years, for decades... The tol­er­ance, the room for great dif­fer­ences among neigh­bors— dif­fer­ences that often go far deeper than dif­fer­ences in color— which are pos­sible and normal in in­tensely urban life... are pos­sible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equip­ment al­lowing strangers to dwell in peace to­gether... Lowly, un­pur­poseful and random as they may ap­pear, side­walk con­tacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.⁸

Dig­ital Com­mons

In pre­vious posts, I've ex­pressed in­terest in using spa­tial analo­gies to un­der­stand how we might carve out sim­ilar public "spaces" on­line; and what the rights of dig­ital cit­izen might en­tail in these spaces and else­where. I'm taking to heart some of Sun­stein's sug­ges­tions for how to build a more de­mo­c­ratic web— es­pe­cially the idea of spon­ta­neous "shared ex­pe­ri­ences". As an artist, I'm in­ter­ested in the dif­ferent ways to create those ex­pe­ri­ences on­line, es­pe­cially through video and other vi­sual media. Sun­stein sug­gested some­thing like: "de­lib­er­a­tivedemoc­racy.org" to host a 24/​7 forum for so­cial and po­lit­ical de­lib­er­a­tion.

The do­main is still avail­able, but ab­surdly ex­pen­sive for a grad­uate stu­dent. I hope l-o-o-s-e-d.net will suf­fice for some fu­ture ex­per­i­ments.