The creativity that cannot be bubble-wrapped

In spite of Eli’s and this blogger’s concern that filter bubbles could put a damper on innovation and creativity, there is one realm that is evidently immune to the filter: the humorous internet meme.

Whether photo-shopping, re-mixing, re-producing or auto-tuning, online denizens show no shortage of creativity in riffing off of each other and, to reference Arthur Koestler again, “bisociating” two ideas into new, clever, creations.

You’re no doubt familiar with the “Charlie Bit My Finger” phenomenon (if not, do a search and enjoy the hundreds – or thousands – of knock offs on the original home video sensation). I thank Michael Agger over at Slate for introducing me this morning to an endless trove of similar comic collaborations. Know Your Meme will chart you through the history of the Bed Intruder, the Double Rainbow, the Fashionable Chinese Bum, and countless others. (If you don’t want to waste hours of your day, do not check out Super Cut Movie Cliches.)

Perhaps the filter bubble can’t stifle humorous creativity precisely because, as Eli writes about, humor is one of the few things that manages to pierce our bubbles. If you glance at any “top emailed” or “most popular” list, you’re certain to see humorous articles and videos monopolizing the list. For anyone who’s spent more than an hour online, it’s almost not worth explaining why this is so. Who can resist an opportunity to laugh, whether it comes in the form of a forwarded email, a Facebook post or a link on our favorite online mag?

But should we be encouraged by the the penetrability of humor? Probably not. The darker side of humor is that it represents one the “junk foods” we do tend to feast off of online – along with gossip, cute animals, morally shocking news and, of course, porn. None of these items are likely to be slowed down by our filter bubbles. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that. But when Antoine Dodson is the one thing we’re sharing and collaborating on, it’s nothing to sing (or auto-tune) about.

cross-posted from TheFilterBubble

recent research

The weekly browse through Kevin Lewis' blog:

• What we want is relative to what we have, politically speaking.
• We root for the underdog, unless he gets too violent.
• Hearing what the enemy has to say may not be a good thing.
• Political progress follows economic setbacks.
• Feeling like a global citizen makes us act more globally.
• Uncertainty and low self-esteem make us less democratically inclined.
• Is conservatism a response to our fear of death? Or will any ideology do.
• Schadenfreude: a product of envy.
• Politics is personal: men more likely to be drafted are also more anti-war.
• Contrary to stereotypes, more emotional voters are not the less sophisticate voters. (Even though emotions make us all less rational.)
• What ticks us off are not acts that hurt us, but acts that we deem immoral.
• Laws affect our attitudes - but only when we can see the effects of the laws.
• When it comes to analyzing other's "selfless" behavior, we're cynics.
• More evidence that power pays: US House members earn abnormal stock market returns.
• And that payment is power: interest groups have an effect on immigration policy.
• Which party is responsible for the economic booms and busts? Depends upon what party you belong to.
• House members on health care committees get more contributions from the health care industry, right? Not necessarily so. But maybe lobbyists make up the difference.
• Corporations that are more likely to contribute to campaigns: those privately owned or with a principal owner.

The – true – Republic of Twitter

As has been mentioned before in this blog and in Eli’s book, the internet has not turned out to be the democratic utopia of information it was once hoped to be. If our information is not being piped through (albeit new) elite media hubs, then it is being filtered through the bubble of our and our friends’ preferences.

That’s at least the case for most of the internet. One exception, however, may be Twitter.

Unlike Facebook and Google, Twitter doesn’t make assumptions about the tweets you’d prefer to see. What you sign up for is what you get. It’s bubble-free media.

Twitter, new research suggests, may also be anti-elitist. We’ all know about the Ashton Kutchers and Old Spice Men of mega-twit fame. Turns out that, in spite of their gajillion followers, those Tweet Leviathans have little influence in spreading memes. Looking at 580 million tweets over 8 months and using some fancy statistical crunching, researchers found that mid-range tweeters (who have about 1,000 followers) are much more influential when it comes to creating and spreading hashtags.

Could that mean Twitter is indeed the democratic medium we’ve all been looking for? We don’t like to jump to conclusions based on one study (especially one with new-fangled statistical techniques), but the study’s findings temptingly align with the theory that on Twitter information roams free. (On an even more conjectural note, their research may also mean Twitter deserves credit on the “maximizing creativity by minimizing silos” front.)

The impressive research – which comes in two reports and which also tracked memes in stories longer than 140 characters – contains some other fun tidbits, although none directly relevant to the filter bubble. Of note:

• Partly depending on whether memes (defined in longer stories as “short phrases”) started in mainstream news sites or blogs, they had disparate patterns of peaking and trothing online. (The researchers found 6 distinct patterns).
• The influence of mainstream media v. blogs in spreading memes depends on the subject area. When it comes to Entertainment and Tech, for example, blogs rule.
• Finally, don’t tell Bill Keller, but when comparing the influence of the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, USA Today wins out on every beat, except for National News where it is bested by WSJ. (Note: even the authors are surprised by these results.)

reposted from TheFilterBubble

That other – imperfect – gatekeeper

The internet gave great hopes for the liberation of information. No longer controlled by elitist (or corporatist) editorial gatekeepers, now “all” the news (not just what was fit to print) could truly be accessible to the people. A new era of democratized media was dawning.

Well, that’s not exactly what happened. Writers like Evgeny Morozov point out that political power can still manipulate the internet to meet its ends. And as Eli discusses in The Filter Bubble, gatekeepers haven’t gone away – they’ve just been replaced with a new algorithmic breed, which bring their own set of concerns for democracy.

One of those concerns is what happens when the news we’re delivered is the news the personalized algorithms think we want. I’m a pretty worldly, news-savvy gal, but I admit that I can’t help clicking on those hat photos from the royal wedding or the latest gossip from Dancing with the Stars. If the personalization bots interpret those clicks as “Give the girl the fluff she wants”, how much more trash will be sent to tempt me – and how much “important” news will go missing from my news feeds?

As Eli puts it in his TED talk, the new gatekeepers may be turning us into junk-news gluttons. The old gate-keepers had their problems, but at least they made sure we got our news vegetables along with our dessert.

Or did they?

Today Slate reminded us that even our elitist of elite publishers can sideline the vegetables for sweeter fare. The day after the first GOP presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, an important marker in our political discourse, one would have thought the 4th Estate would have brought the event to our attention. Not so. The debate didn’t show up in print in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal until somewhere between pages A3-A19. What did make the front page? Stories about “Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams, Pippa Middleton, and UFO sightings in Thailand.”

Now, in the editors’ defense, it was a debate populated by few real contenders. But still. Pippa Middleton?

Of course, since the news giants lost their captive print audiences, they’ve been in the same race to the lowest common denominator as have the personalization algorithms. Perhaps the NYT, WaPo and WSJ of 1995 would have had the debate on the front page. Either way, when it comes to getting a balanced diet of food, today we may be all on our own.

reposted from TheFilterBubble

Vampires, wizards and American identity

If you agree that having a common national identity is critical to a well-functioning democracy, filter bubbles may give you cause for concern.

Not that there’s anything wrong with sub-national identities. Since long before the days of Dixies and Yanks, America has been a vibrant mix of regional and sub-cultural identities. That’s a feature, not a bug.

But even as we self-sort and brand ourselves as Hipsters, Hip-Hop-sters, Christians, Vegans, Locovores, Nascars, etc. – Americans have shared a common narrative that’s lets us all, more or less, identify as “Americans” and work together when times get tough.

As filter bubbles draw us deeper into our sub-cultural silos and place a narrative wall around groups of Americans, however, that shared national identity could start to erode (if it hasn’t already).

The good and bad news is our sense of identity may be pretty malleable.

In a study published last month, researchers were able to induce a new identity in test subjects in under an hour. The fresh identity participants took on? Vampires and wizards.

All it took was a little narrative. 140 undergrads sat down to read 30 minutes of either Twilight or Harry Potter and then take a couple of personality tests. Students who read Twilight were more likely to associate themselves with words like “blood, fangs, bitten, undead” and to say they had sharp teeth. The effect was even stronger for test subjects who were more group-oriented.

The bad news is that if we can identify with mythical creatures so easily, then it’s no surprise we readily take on the identities of humans in our narrow social networks.

The good news is that, as long as our filter bubbles let even drops of a common national narrative seep through (as it did this week with the OBL story), it might be enough for us to feel we’re still all “Americans.”

reposted from TheFilterBubble

when seeing is mis-believing

Hampshire, England delivers a great example of confirmation bias - the phenomenon of seeing what you expect to see - in the shape of a stuffed tiger.

recent research

An ongoing trawl through Kevin Lewis' blog:

• The market left to itself might not spark the greatest innovation.
• How non-cooperators can promote cooperation.
• We're all communitarians at heart.
• How to keep your group in line: just punish the least compliant guy.
• We don't expect people to trust us, but we do expect them to return our trust.
• We sit by people who look like us and marry people who vote like us.
• Priming "relatedness" brings out the volunteer and donor in us - as does feeling more powerful and seeing our movements mirrored.
• The power of metaphor: we prefer in "North" hoods.
• "Cause marketing" may be hurting causes - and making us feel worse when we donate.
• When it comes to donating we tend to prefer writing checks for the latest disaster.
• Off-cycle elections give special interest groups an extra edge.

Participatory budgeting in the heartland

Omaha asks its citizens for input on setting budget priorities.

recent research

A weekly trawl of Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Narrative and identity: it only takes half an hour.
• Defense hawks may just feel like personally out of control.
• Deconstructing O'Reilly.
• More evidence that, deep down, we're natural bigots.
• You may have heard of inattentional blindness; now comes inattentional deafness.
• Do politicians care more about good policy or getting reelected? You guessed it.
• Teddy bears for peace.
• Merely thinking about shared experiences with people from other cultures makes us less bigoted.
• We elect divided governments in part because we're each divided over how we feel about the parties.
• One way to lose voters: move the polls.
• Resistant to reforms? You might be sensitive to injustice.
• In case you didn't know: when it comes to legislative debates, Congressmembers like to talk about the policies, but media prefer to report on the politics.
• One way your House member hears you: how we vote on ballot measures.
• Is more vigorous democracy also more dissatisfied democracy?
• Opinionated news isn't necessarily more biasing news.
• Texting gets voters to the polls.
• Election reforms that help and hurt voter turnout.
• Special interest groups: a downer for economic growth.
• To know a gay guy is to support gay rights.
• Evidence that social networks spread information.

MLK and the brief life of a misinformation cascade

Another day, another Filter Bubble phenomenon from the Facebook feed.

Unless to you are a social media luddite, you experienced it too: After “Ding dong the Laden is dead” choruses swept the nation yesterday morning, a quiet backlash of peace and love had blanketed the Walls of Facebook and Twitter by early evening. Everybody and their Buddhist aunt had posted:

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr

An apt quote from MLK to express the sentiment that, perhaps, our cheers were unseemly.

A little too apt. As Megan McArdle at the Atlantic pointed out by 6:23pm, King had never uttered or penned those words. It seems the well meaning pacifist posters were unwitting participants in a misinformation cascade.

But just as quickly the misquote had conquered the internet, almost as quickly did McArdle’s post beat it into a hasty retreat.

The episode has a lot to tell us about how (mis)information cascades operate. Every Malcolm Gladwell devotee is familiar with the basic idea of a cascade; information or behaviors (like wearing hush puppies) can slowly trickle through a population, but sometimes – when a “tipping point” of people catch on – the fad can wildfire. What causes that burst is a set of ingredients that Network Theorists are still trying to understand.

One ingredient is how primed the population is for a meme. In the MLK case, it’s clear there was a turn-the-other-cheek zeitgeist just waiting to be awakened. If the MLK quote hadn’t existed, it would have been invented, as they say. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.

The second consideration is the cost of signing on to a fad. Putting up the payment for a Prius will require deliberation even if all your eco-friends are doing it. A seemingly free task of forwarding an email also costs – in effort – and may make a potential cascade contributor pause a moment and wonder “is this really worth sending?” But posting a cool quote on Facebook? Presto, it’s done.

The final factor is how closely we are connected. Memes have a hard time seeping through sparse information connections, but in the closely knit age of 250 Friends and Twitter followers, information has no problem flooding a social network.

But, as some theorists have theorized, a really dense information network will be impervious to fads. How’s that? If we’re all getting information from hundreds of friends, there’s a good chance that any meme you get from a handful of friends will be antidoted by info from another set of friends. It’s similar to the theory that information cascades are actually kind of fragile; just as they can flare up, they can be easily doused by one authoritative correction (see page 503).

Megan McArdle was just such an authority. By this morning, the spate of MLK-quoting tweets had been replaced by an equal flow of MLK-debunkers. The one lone quote I saw on Facebook, was quickly corrected.

What does all that tell us about Filter Bubbles? It supports the theory that when information freely flows, mis-truths have a tough time taking hold. OLB’s death was one of those occasions that we were all paying attention. The posts and tweets were flying with enough frequency and velocity that bubbles didn’t really stand a chance. It was a rare, bubble-free day.

But normally we’re sharing information with fewer people – and with people who think a lot like ourselves. In normal times we’re less likely to come across a debunking McArdle to counteract a mis-truth (that’s why sites like Snopes still stay in business).

Perhaps more significantly, misinformation is rarely as un-loaded as a mis-attributed quote. For a variety of political, ideological and cognitive reasons, on many topics we’ll hold on to false information no matter how much it gets corrected. But that’s a blog post for another day…

(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)

OBL and the death of creativity

“I’ll believe it when I see the long-form death certificate.”

If you have friends like mine you probably saw four of five versions of that joke on your Facebook feed this morning.

It’s a phenomenon which I’ll call “spontaneous comedy” and which – in a round about way – illustrates Eli’s worry that the filter bubble could put a damper on creativity and innovation.

Here’s where I’m coming from: New ideas don’t appear from nowhere. Even creative geniuses (or especially creative geniuses) come by their inventions and insights by connecting two earlier innovations or concepts. It’s a process Arthur Koestler popularized as “bisociation” and which nicely explains the “Eureka” moments of everyone from Archimedes to Watson and Crick.

Sometimes we’re all exposed to the same two ideas and a Eureka is “ripe” to happen to a handful of us simultaneously. That’s when you get 7 scientists discovering the cellular basis of all life in 1839. Or, in the case of comedic invention, when everyone is thinking of Obama’s long-form birth certificate and the OBL’s death -and out pop 5 independent “long-form death certificate” jokes.

But while some bisociations are just waiting to click, what makes the rare creatives stand out is their exposure to concepts from seemingly distinct worlds (cultures, academic disciplines, fields of art, etc.) – and, thus, their ability to make connections that their more narrowly-focused peers couldn’t see.

That’s something Eli wants us to keep our eye on. What happens when we lose exposure to ideas and concepts because our filter bubbles is blocking them out? We may all be getting a chuckle out of the same jokes – but how many inventions, insights and innovations will we miss out on?

(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)

The “Wants” and the other personalization bubble

Can we give Ashlee Vance over at Bloomberg early props for coining the term the “Wants”?

Just like their Quant brethren over on Wall Street, the Wants depend on algorithms and massive computing power to churn data for economic gain – but instead of gaming the market, their gaming you to click on ads.

"At social networking companies, Wants may sit among the computer scientists and engineers, but theirs is the central mission: to poke around in data, hunt for trends, and figure out formulas that will put the right ad in front of the right person. Wants gauge the personality types of customers, measure their desire for certain products, and discern what will motivate people to act on ads. “The most coveted employee in Silicon Valley today is not a software engineer. It is a mathematician,” says Kelman, the Redfin CEO. “The mathematicians are trying to tickle your fancy long enough to see one more ad.”"

Vance profiles one Quant-turned-Want in particular, Jeff Hammerbacher, the first Facebook employee charged with making sense of the social site’s vast troves of personal data. Perhaps the industry’s first Want apostate, Hammerbacher jumped ship in 2008 after sensing he was part of a new tech bubble.

Unlike other inflated markets, which usually leave infrastructure hardware and software in their wake, Hammerbacher feared this bubble would just leave a legacy of wasted minds.

"“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”"

Luckily, Hammerbacher’s career trajectory belies his concern. The data guru has founded a new venture that aims to give companies even greater processing power. But instead of using data to figure out how to get people to spend more time on Farmville, it’ll help researchers, say, decode cancer genes and work more quickly toward a cure.

(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)

Youtube tries to get past your partisan filter

Eli’s book, of course, is about what happens when personalization algorithms filter the information we see – but he’s also frank about the fact that we do a lot of information filtering on our own, without the aid of online bots. For the most part, we don’t go to Drudge or HuffPo because an algorithm leads us there via our friend’s Facebook feed; we actively choose our information sources based on whether they share our worldview.

But the self-reinforcing forces don’t stop there. Even if we were to skim an article that disagrees with our beliefs, we’re unlikely to read it with an open mind. Instead we’ll cherry pick the information that supports our position, and pick apart everything else. (In one famous study, subjects who read identical papers supporting and contesting the death penalty tended to strengthen their previous views, regardless of whether they were for or against capital punishment.) And if the argument comes from a source we distrust – well, the odds are even greater that the only facts that will filter through are those that jive with our viewpoint.

Youtube seems to know that, likewise, a Republican politician has a long shot of winning any converts from the Democratic party when it comes to a debate on the issues (and vice versa). In a new civic-minded venture with Congress, the Google subsidiary will host pro-con policy face-offs between US senators starting May 2. To get past our partisan filters and increase the chances we’ll give both sides a fair hearing, the senators won’t be identified by by party.

The project planners are banking on viewers not being able to tell a Jim DeMint from a Dick Durbin (wisely so). But although it can remove the “messenger” bias, there’s not much Youtube can do to stop us from sifting out disconfirming information once we know the upshot of the “message.” Nonetheless, getting past two filters – by showing us two sides of an issue and (partly) cloaking the source – is a promising step in the right direction.

(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)

the friendly rumor mill

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.”

Don DeLillo’s insight could now be extended to friends, according to new study.

Kelly Garrett, an Ohio State prof, surveyed Americans about 10 rumors that swirled around the internet during the 2008 elections. Unsurprisingly, Garrett found, Americans came across a lot of rumors online – but they also came across rebuttals, which in the end cancelled out any propensity to fall for the rumors.

But while the 600 surveyed were immune to fabrications on the web, they were not unsusceptible to rumors they received from friends via email. Friends, of course, are trustworthy sources in our eyes. And since our friends tend to hold similar views, we’re unlikely to get emailed equally “trustworthy” rebuttals to balance out the falsehoods.

Garrett’s results suggest that Eli’s concern that personalization algorithms create yet another cradle (or filter bubble) of misinformation is not wholly imagined. While more rumors filter through our friends, and rebuttals get bounced out, we’re increasingly likely to be a misinformed nation.

(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)

Conspiracy theory nation

This week Slate's David Weigel reviews Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, Jonathan Kay's tour of Truthers, Birthers and Vacciners, among other nutty theorists.

The explanation for the apparent explosion of conspiracy groups? Our self-imposed information bubbles:

"The media, as Kay points out, is more fragmented than ever. Information is easier to come across, and bogus information has a way of jumping to the top of Google's search pages. That fragmentation is happening at a time of intense partisan anger and economic angst."

(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)