Snug Inside the Echo Chamber

This is how we all ought to react when we discover we're in an echo chamber.

William Saletan at Slate.com, in urging everyone to exit the echo chambers they remain in as they seek and consume and regurgitate news and politics and social commentary, manages to give some salient points while remaining snugly in the echo chamber that says only (or mostly) conservatives are the ones trying to shout over the echoes.

His ten ways to keep our minds free are good points, and deserve further discussion. Where he fails, however, is in citing examples of conservatives violating his points.

He starts off strong with No. 1: Treat insularity as a weakness:

If you don’t seriously consider your opponents’ best arguments, you’ll be unprepared to answer them. If you don’t engage people whose premises differ from yours, you’ll never learn to persuade them and broaden your movement. If you don’t heed changes in the country’s needs and political climate, you’ll fail to adapt and survive. A conservative who matches wits with the New York Times every day is stronger than the one who mainlines Fox.

Bravo.

But from there on out, however, he falls into the liberal echo chamber that states “It’s only the conservatives who have their hands over their ears while saying ‘lalalalalalalalala’ who are in the echo chambers, but as they emerge into the freedom of progressive thought, they see the error of their ways.”

I see liberals who can’t test their theories and can’t bear to risk falsification when confronted with Climategate – which Saletan brushes aside, violating his inability to beware abstraction (No. 8), overcome his urges (No. 10), and seek wisdom, not just victory (No. 5) to recognize that the “science is settled” argument is cracking when confronted with data falsification, manipulation, and scientific intimidation.

It’s sad, in a way, to see Saletan’s arguments crumble against his own refusal to recognize that he’s trapped in a progressive echo chamber as he tries to offer poor conservatives the advice they need to exit theirs. He does toss in an occasional jab at those on the left, but they come across as asides to the more deeply explored jabs at the right. In this, he’s violating No. 3 (never define yourself by an enemy), No. 4 (don’t outsource your beliefs to your allies) and No. 6 (distrust polarization).

Overall, Saletan is also demonstrating a violation of No. 1, in continuing to jab the left while only tossing out the less egregious examples of offense of his tenets by the left. There are plenty of left-leaning politicians, talking heads, pundits and voters who are just as guilty as being closed-minded as those on the right, it’s just that those on the left are controlling the conversation by identifying their views as “progressive” and those of the conservatives as the only ones needing adaptation.

Saletan, in short, needs to re-read his closing statement, and follow it. Of course, we all do:

We’re all vain and lazy. In the electronic echo chamber, it’s easier than ever to shut out what you don’t want to hear. Nobody will make you open the door and venture out. You’ll have to do that yourself.

Liberals declaring their freedom from the liberal echo chamber. For a contrasting view at a more "middle of the road" news outlet, go here.

Update: Today, Saletan defends his writing by pointing out that some critics are taking what he wrote out of context. While that may be true in most cases, what he wrote is still a bit shaky in that the major examples he discussed of echo chamberism are all on the part of conservatives. He treats the liberal examples -- as I noted in this post -- as asides.

Slate Joins in on the Echo Chamber Fun

The folks over at Slate are taking a look at the Echo Chamber/Daily Me study that I blogged about a week ago, and want Slate readers to chime in to see if they're politically isolated as they read online or, as per the hypothesis put up in the study, that Internet news soaker-uppers are actually pretty balanced in their approach to viewing news that doesn't necessarily agree with their political stripe.

What's fun is that Slate has a little profile checker readers can use to test their news isolation. As I understand it, the closer the number is to zero, the more balanced an internet news consumer you are. But they point out the caveat that the study authors point out as well: Just because a person is reading news that is in opposition to their political views doesn't mean anyone can tell what they're doing with those opposition views. More than likely, just getting angry or nodding their heads saying: "Ayup, them fools on the other side of the spectrum are still durn fools."

I took their little profile quiz, and this is the result: As far as Internet news reading goes, I sag in the middle. Here's a list of sites Slate knows I frequent, followed by their "conservative" score:

Newsbusters, 81 percent
Slate, 49 percent 
Newsweek, 49
Time, 50 percent
USA Today, 60 percent
New York Times, 40 percent
CNN, 54 percent

It's easy to see that I sag in the middle -- or am a moderate, as I like to say it -- since most of the sites I visit are middle of the road. That Newsweek isn't closer to the NYT liberally is surprising, but at least it does show up with a slight liberal slant. In the aggregate, readership avg on these sites 55 conservative, 45 percent liberal, which gives me an isolation index of -2, or about 2 percentage points to the left. So though I am a moderate, per my news consumption, I lean ever slightly to the left.

Add one site into the mix, however -- The BBC, with a conservative index of 22 percent -- and my isolation index pops up to a startling -25, meaning if I read BBC news on a more consistent basis, I'd be considered more liberal.

That's on my work computer. At home, the story is slightly different:

NewsBusters, 81% conservative
NPR: National Public Radio, 28% conservative
Slate, 49% conservative
Newsweek, 49% conservative
Time, 50% conservative
ABC News, 60% conservative
USA Today, 60% conservative
CNN, 54% conservative
MSNBC, 57% conservative

At these sites, the readership is on average 54 percent conservative, 46 percent liberal, per Slate's little calculator. That puts my at home isolation index at -8, meaning that, on the bell curve of all readers, my news diet is 8 percentage points to the left. So an interesting comparison there. I obviously consume more news, with a wider variety of viewpoints, at work.

But that doesn't tell the whole story. I, like many internet users, get my news from a wider variety of sources than those the study or Slate is willing to track. I get some news from aggregators -- notably Digg.com and Fark.com, so a lot of that consumption doesn't show up unless I happen to hit one of the tracked sites. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating study that deserves attention now, and a follow-up on what readers do with the news they view, later. Yet another interesting PhD dissertation topic.

Gaia is Trying to Kill Us

When Pat Robertson said voodoo and a nation "selling its soul to the devil" caused January's Haiti earthquake, most people cringed, shook their head, and wondered why the guy had to say something that stupid.

When Iranian clerics say promiscuity is what's causing earthquakes worldwide, even I, a relatively conservative person, have to laugh when a young American woman uses Facebook to organize a bevy of women ready to dress provocatively to provoke a "Boobquake."

The liberals, of course, have a field day with this kind of nonsense, pointing to these, somewhat rightly, as examples of how religion is spreading nonsense around the world.

But when a liberal commentator -- and not just a few of them, read some here and many examples here -- believes that earthquakes, the Icelandic volcanic eruption and other natural disasters this year represent "Earth striking back," can't we, as rational people, also file them in the Loony Boat?

I certainly will.

What author Alan Wiseman writes at CNN.com is ludicrous. He brings up some shocking, absolutely shocking, scientific evidence that earthquakes and volcanoes occur along tectonic plate boundaries. This is, he says, evidence that melting icecaps and more carbon in the atmosphere is going to lead to MORE earthquakes and volcanoes.

It's looking like this may be a long decade. And if we don't pull carbon out of the way we energize our lives soon, a small clump of our not-too-distant surviving descendants may find themselves, as Gaia scientist James Lovelock has direly predicted, like the first Icelanders: gathered on some near-barren hunk of rock near one of the still-habitable poles, trying yet anew to eke out a plan for human civilization.

Doesn't Wiseman realize he sounds as stupid -- and rightly so -- as Robertson and those wacky Iranian clerics?

Brendann O'Neil, writing at reason.com, thinks so:

Hundreds of years ago, before the birth of the science of volcanology in the 19th century, mankind looked upon volcanic eruptions as warnings or punishments from the gods. The gods were literally blowing their tops, spewing forth fire and rocks and ash to express their disgust or disappointment with we mere mortals and our habit of messing things up.

Now, remarkably, this backward outlook, this idea that volcanoes are somehow semi-sentient forces giving fiery lectures to mankind, is making a comeback thanks to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. The fact that ash from the volcano is spreading across Europe, leading to the grounding of flights and the closure of airports, is being interpreted—even celebrated—as evidence of Nature’s awesome power and “fury” in contrast to weak, pathetic mankind.

So we got voodoo-fearers and promiscuity-fearers on the right, contrasting with "Earth is sentient and trying to kill us all" on the left. Folks wonder why I sag in the middle.

Can human activity increase the frequency of earthquakes? No.

Is recent earthquake activity unusual? No.

But because Wisemann's blatherings and other lib storytelling toes the global warming line, those on the left are as willing to blind their eyes to scientific fact as they accuse those on the right of being blind when climate science is trotted out in front of them. Pot, meet Mister Kettle. Y'all are both a little sooty.

The left screams at the unscientific, religious fiddle-faddle on the right, and yet give Wisemann and others of his ilk on the left a pass because, well, at least they're preaching the right kind of message. Anything that makes global warming something to fear and makes industrial society look stupid and wasteful and unbenificient. Makes me want to ship the far left and the far right to Iceland and toss them all into the volcano.

Shattering the Myth of the 'Daily Me'

I read an interesting study today that challenges the notion that folks who get their news online are more likely to seek out news that aligns with their political ideology than those who get their news from traditional sources such as newspaper, television, and word of mouth.

The study, available for download here, was done by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, both from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and was released on April 12 this year.

I won't go into the details here; I'll leave that to Mssrs Gentzkow and Shapiro, but I will say it looks as if they approached this in a logical and statistically defensible way -- in other words, I think they're unbiased and did their work well within the realms of statistic acceptability.

They begin with the supposition -- the old saw, actually -- that the Internet is moving us towards the phenomenon known either as the echo chamber or the Daily Me, in which the news we consume is aligned with either our liberal or conservative ideologies. In other words, conservatives will go to Fox News or other more extreme sites with conservative bents and consume news there and only there, while liberals do the same thing, but on the other side of the spectrum.

What they found out is this:

News consumption online is far from perfectly segregated. The average Internet news consumer's exposure to conservatives is 57 percent, slightly to the left of the US adult population. The average conservative's exposure is 60.6 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from usatoday.com. The average liberal's exposure is 53.1 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from cnn.com. The isolation index for the Internet is 7.5 percentage points, the difference between the average conservative's exposure and the average liberal's exposure.

In comparing this isolation index -- the higher the number, the more likely the person is to get news that already aligns with their personal political ideologies -- puts the Internet at about the center of the news sources the study looked at. The index for broadcast news, magazines and local newspapers was lower than for the Internet, while national newspapers, voluntary associations, work, family and "people you trust" scored higher on the index -- meaning that people who rely on family, work associates and people they trust are more likely to get news that aligns with their political beliefs, while those who get their news on the Internet or from local papers or broadcast television were getting a better balance of news.

More interestingly, the study shows that people with more extreme political views are more likely -- not less likely -- to seek out news from the opposite ideology:

Much of the previous discussion of Internet segregation has focused on the "long tail" of political blogs, news aggregators, and activist sites. We confirm that these sites are often ideologically extreme, but find that they account for a very small share of online consumption. Second, a significant share of consumers get news from multiple outlets. This is especially true for visitors to small sites such as blogs and aggregators. Visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited nytimes.com. Visitors of extreme liberal sites such as thinkprogress.org and moveon.org are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited foxnews.com.

The study does include one caveat: "[N]one of the evidence here speaks to the way people translate the content they encounter into beliefs. People with different ideologies see similar content, but . . . [various mechanisms] may lead people with divergent political views to interpret the same information differently." This is a significant caveat, since how information consumed is interpreted and incorporated -- or left out -- of our political ideologies is significantly more important than if we're exposed to different points of view on the same information.

But that cross-ideological reading is occurring is significant, despite the fact that we have no way of knowing, through this study at least, if such exposure to opposite political views does anything to alter one's held beliefs. But one cannot argue, looking at this study, that the Internet is leading more people to seek only the kind of news they already agree with.

To take an even more extreme example, visitors to stormfront.org, a "discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival," are twice as likely as visitors to Yahoo! News to visit nytimes.com in the same month. This pattern of cross-visiting contrasts with the image of online "echo chambers" where users are never exposed to opposite perspectives.

The Internet makes it easy to consume news from multiple sources. Of course, many people do get news from only one source, but these tend to be light users, and their sole source tends to be one of the large relatively centrist outlets. Most of the people who visit sites like drudgereport.com or huffingtonpost.com, by contrast, are heavy Internet users, likely with a strong interest in politics. Although their political views are relatively extreme, they also tend to consume more of everything, including centrist sites and occasionally sites with conflicting ideology. Their omnivorous outweighs their ideological extremity, preventing their overall news diet from becoming too skewed.

So people who get their news from the Internet more than from people they trust -- and this is interpreted as people they can talk with face-to-face -- have a better chance of being exposed to opposite political ideology. That explains how Pauline Kael could exclaim: "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know a single person who voted for him." That was in 1968, the year Nixon won 60 percent of the popular vote, to George McGovern's 37 percent.

We Cannot Allow . . .

I have to be quiet about this where I live, but I think Glenn Beck is a loon.

I think a lot of the pundits on the right (and, let's be honest, on the left) are absolutely bonkers. No one else in the universe is better than stirring that kettle of crazy (cue the picture) than political pundits.


Or politicians. Or dittoheads who lean to the right or lean to the left. Anybody who can't stick a crowbar in their brain and open it up to another point of view, or see -- as anybody could see -- that the kids singing about Barack Obama in this Jon Stewart video are just that: kids singing about Barack Obama. My daughter used to sing incessantly this song about George Washington, to which I'd add, because it fit with the meter and cadence of the song, the following:

George Washington was a very good man,
a very good man indeed!
He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl,
and he called for his fiddlers three!

I've never thought she was being indoctrinated. Neither would I think that if she came home singing a song about Barack Obama. He does happen to be our president, you know. Kids are kind of interested in that. Hey, Barack Obama is our president. Neato. But to compare the singing of this song to Nazi indoctrination or the activities of the Khmer Rouge is beyond ridiculous. It even surpasses ludicrous speed. It's plaid, plain and simple.

And it makes you look stupid. Like this:

But back to Glenn Beck. I don't mind that people like him. That's just fine. People can listen to his show, buy products advertised on his show, and all that. Fine by me. Just don't make me listen to it, or insist that what he says is right. Because I don't buy it. I don't buy a lot of what pundits of his ilk, on the left or the right, say. It's their profession to make noise and to stay on the air and to stir up that kettle of crazy.

This kind of thinking and conuming, however, does little to promote the public interest. Here's what Woodrow Wilson had to say about such things:

I have sometimes reflected on the lack of a body of public opinion in our cities, and once I contrasted the habits of the city many with those of the countryman in a way which got me into trouble. I described what a man in a city generally did when ge got into a public vehicle or sat in a public place. He doesn't talk to anybody, but he plunges his head into a newspaper and presently experiences a reaction which he calls his opinion, but which is not an opinion at all, being merely the impression that a piece of news or an editorial has made upon him. He cannot be said to be participating in public opinion at all until he had laid his mind alongside the minds of his neighbors and discussed with them the incidents of the day and the tendencies of the time.

If we exchange the concept of truthiness for cities and city, we get close to what's going on today. We consume what appears to be true, that which has truthiness, that in which we already believe. And we close our mind to everything else. If we think schools are trying to "indoctrinate" our children with Barack Obama, and then we see children singing a song about him, whammo, we have what we're looking for. But it's all taken out of context. Ask the kids what they were doing, and they'd say, well, we were singing a song about Barack Obama. Some would have fun singing. Others would not. Some would get enthusiastic about the song because they get enthusiastic about any song, even one that their Daddy mangles by bringing in a nursery rhyme. But is this brainwashing? Not any more than the activity I performed most mornings when I was in elementary school: reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while standing with my hand over my heart staring at the flag hanging in the corner. Sometimes we sang the pledge. And sometimes we sang the Washing Machine Song. Neither meant I was being indoctrinated. It just meant I was going through the motions at school, with varying amounts of gusto, like any other kid.

So to those who think I should be worried -- to Glenn Beck -- I say, meh.