The Thanksgiving Playbook: A Tool to Combat Denialism and Help You Win Thanksgiving Debates

Abstract:

Habermas’ public sphere is a critical architectural component of democracies around the world. In this paper, I argue that while the public sphere is important, the psychology literature dictates that the public sphere could never have existed as the ideal discursive space ruled by reason that Habermas described. I then argue that the phenomenon of denialism, where large amounts of people reject the scientific consensus on an issue, is the result of an exploitation of these specific flaws in the public sphere. I then propose that we combat denialism through two methods: (1) a bottom-up strategy which involves the construction of a web and mobile app called The Thanksgiving Playbook (TPP) which empowers users with strategies to convince denialists, and (2) a top-down strategy which involves the creation of an anti-denialism public relations organization that creates media aimed at denialists to shift the norms of denialist communities.

Full Text: The Thanksgiving Playbook: A Tool to Combat Denialism and Help You Win Thanksgiving Debates

Connected Movements: Lowering Standards Rather Than Stifling Progress

In “Small Change,” Malcolm Gladwell seems to throw a wrench in the dreams of techno-utopians who claim to have solved the problems of civil society through networked computers.  And he makes a compelling case.  The crux of his argument rests upon differences in classes of interpersonal connections, the differences between what he calls “weak-ties” and “strong-ties.”  Gladwell masterfully paints a comparison between two very different kinds of activism where these different types of connections draw stark dividing lines: the Greensboro sit-ins during the American civil rights movement and internet-enabled activism such as Sameer Bhatia’s Bone Marrow Drive.

Gladwell accurately points out that the reason Bhatia’s drive was successful is because the internet enables large networks of weakly connected individuals to unite around an effort: in this case saving Bhatia from leukemia.  Gladwell also accurately points out that these sorts of networks, when faced with actions more along the lines of rising up against a totalitarian government than being tested for a bone marrow match, crumple under the pressure and risk involved in taking such actions.

Gladwell is right.  Weakly tied networks formed solely over the internet are not well equipped for the kind of high-risk activism required to make lasting change in civil society.  Yet, this is as far as his argument holds up, and the conclusions he draws from then on rest on the ashes of the straw man that Gladwell has set ablaze.

Gladwell takes his argument that weak ties cannot produce movements that create real change and projects it upon the entirety of online activism.  He assumes that no movement which takes place online can be anything but a weakly tied network of slacktivists liking the ‘Save Darfur’ page on Facebook and then going about their daily lives.  Yet, why does this have to be the case?

Somewhere in Gladwell’s chain of logic is the assumption that equates online activism with weak ties.  Since Gladwell himself does not back up this claim, he leaves it to the reader to believe him on face value.  Let’s probe into this a little and see why it certainly is not a claim that is obviously true, or even likely true.

Activists have been around as long as society has existed.  People who are willing to place their ideals above themselves and make it their mission to organize a movement which enacts those ideals have been the lifeblood of societal change throughout history.  And, as Gladwell points out, behind almost all of those successful movements lies strong-ties which bind together those activists and enable them to persevere through the difficulties on their path towards success.  So why do these people suddenly go away in a world that includes Facebook and Twitter?

The only argument that would explain a sudden absence of heavily committed and strongly connected activists is the hypothesis that people who would have joined such strongly connected networks of activists will now do nothing more than like a Facebook page.  But that is nothing more than an unlikely hypothesis with absolutely no evidence to back such a claim.  Why would someone who previously cared enough about an issue to scream into the barrel of a gun now settle for liking something on facebook?

In fact, the emergence of social media is not the first time we have seen people worry that a society’s modern technology would prevent activists from going to the streets and taking the risks required to bring their ideals to society.  In 1970 amid the height of the same movement that Gladwell points to as the epitome of strong-ties, Gil Scott-Heron wrote in a famous poem that Gladwell makes a nod to:

“You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised”

One of his concerns was that America’s consumer-oriented and television-drenched culture would prevent people from leaving the comfort of their armchairs and going to the streets to fight for their ideals instead of watching others on their television sets.  Sound familiar?  Yet, amid those concerns, there were still strongly connected networks who boycotted buses in Montgomery and sat at whites-only counters in Greensboro.  In fact, the revolution was televised, but people still showed up to the streets instead of watching from their armchairs

If we’ve seen this sort of concern before, and it has proven to be false, then Gladwell’s argument must imply that social media is categorically different from any of the other technologies that could have had civic-numbing effects on people in the past.  In the article, Gladwell explains that:

“It is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

But in reality, the evidence that does exist seems to show the opposite.

In a talk entitled Now I Know Who My Comrades Are, Emily Parker makes the argument for three important ways that the internet and social media empower, rather than hinder, strongly connected networks of activists taking taking great risks.  From talking to activists in Russia, Cuba and China, Parker observes that the internet has undermined three of the most powerful tools of totalitarian regimes: Isolation, Fear and Apathy.

Parker tells the story of Anti, a Chinese citizen who became a dissident after downloading the video of the 1989 crackdown on protestors in Tiananmen Square off of a site on the internet.  As a dissident in a one-party state, he turned to the internet as the only place where he “knows where his comrades are.”  Parker also tells the story of Laritza Diversent, a dissident blogger in Cuba.  After Diversent began publishing blogs penned under her own name about the problems under Castro’s rule, she entered an initial state of fear as she became the object of government surveillance.  Yet the more she blogged, the more she realized that becoming a public voice of a dissent in an international community made it much harder for the government to make her disappear.  Parker also tells the story of Alexei Navalny, a Russian dissident who realized that the most difficult problem he had to overcome was the apathy of the Russian people and the cynicism in the idea that they could ever improve their government without being trampled.  Navalny provided a form of “comfortable struggle” using techniques that Gladwell would likely deride as slacktivism, and his act of doing so led to small victories that began to combat the plague of apathy and cynicism.

As the story of Anti shows, the internet empowers activism because it becomes nearly impossible for those in power to disconnect activists and force them into isolation in a modern connected world.  As Diversent’s story highlights, the internet provides activists in a totalitarian regime with the ability to express dissent while affording them enough protection that they don’t have to live life in a state of perpetual fear.  And the epitomical slacktivism that Navalny used in Russia highlights a powerful tool to combat cynicism in an oppressed people, reassuring and empowering them that they are not alone and that they are not helpless.

But internet activism isn’t only useful to those living under a totalitarian regime.  Weakly connected networks of people showing support through ‘likes’ and tweets have an important empowering effect on activists of any kind.  Showing people that they are not alone in their beliefs has the psychological effect of encouraging the leaders of movements and those strongly tied into them to push through adversity because they are fighting for a cause that is bigger than themselves and their immediate network.  And those in the weakly connected network watching from their armchairs are now tied into a media feed which gradually shifts their public perception.

So what explains Gladwell’s complaints?  Zeynep Tufekci, in her talk entitled Movements in a Connected Age: Better at Changing Minds, Worse at Changing Power makes a helpful analogy between what the internet does for movements and what Sherpas do for mountain climbers.  They both make it easy to do what was once extremely difficult.  Organizing thousands of people used to require large amounts of hierarchy, strategy, media production and logistics.  This barrier used to serve as a filter for those who could reach a certain level of attention.  With the internet, that barrier is lowered.  Like the Sherpas of Mt. Everest, the internet enables many people or movements to reach heights they would otherwise be unprepared to reach.  But success in activism requires climbing many peaks: gaining public attention, forcing legislative action, changing cultural norms, etc.  When those guided by a Sherpa arrive at one peak and realize that they must climb the others alone, only some are able to continue.  Gladwell happens to study the ones that can’t, but successful movements like the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, Occupy, and even ISIS show that many others can.

 

Kony 2012: When Organizing Goes Viral

In March of 2012, I was 17 years old and a senior in high school.  I remember sitting in class when as one of my friends, who was 16 years old at the time, was making a powerpoint presentation in front of the class on a man named Joseph Kony.  She talked for a while about the horrible atrocities Kony had committed and the thousands of children he had abducted and murdered.  She then proposed the solution to capturing Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who had been raining terror on northern Uganda for upwards of 20 years: help our high school’s chapter of the Kony 2012 movement by selling bracelets, joining a facebook group and sharing a 30-minute video.

The Kony 2012 campaign was orchestrated by Invisible Children, Inc, a non-profit that had been working since 2004 to expose the atrocities committed by the LRA.  Their mission, was to make Joseph Kony famous so that he would have no place to hide and would be stopped by the end of 2012. Regardless of the effectiveness of the campaign, it was certainly a phenomenon that warrants studying.  Within 5 days of being released, the 30-minute launch video of the campaign received over 26 million views and became the most viral video to have ever been released (see figure 1).  Thousands of activists, most around the age of my friend and a little older, came together across the country and formed groups to figure out what they could do to stop this warlord.

 

 

Figure 1: Public Kony 2012 Video Stats

 

After the movement exploded, it also began to receive a lot of criticism.  The most salient of which made the four following arguments: (1) The campaign left out critical information like the fact that Northern Uganda successfully expelled Joseph Kony years before the 2012 campaign and the LRA was instead loosely operating in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (2) the campaign provided no actionable solutions that help to capture Kony because he and the LRA were already well known among those in central Africa who would actually be doing the pursuit, (3) little of Invisible Children’s budget actually went to helping those in central Africa, and (4) the Kony 2012 narrative furthered harmful western which paint Africa as a continent which cannot help itself and therefore needs the western world to intervene and save the day.  Perhaps as validation to these criticisms, it has now been over three years since the Kony 2012 campaign, and the world is no closer to capturing Joseph Kony.

Yet, the speed at which this movement took hold is clearly fascinating and it is helpful to look at the movement through the lens of the five principles of organizing as outlined by Marshall Ganz: Building a public narrative, establishing relationships, building and empowering teams, forming a strategy and taking action.

Build a public narrative: story of self, us and now

Within this domain, the digital movement of Kony 2012 transformed into something that the world of political organizing had never seen before.  While the video constructed the public narrative similarly to organized movements in the past, it had a focus on something that was not possible in the pre-digital age: virality.  The video starts by priming people to share content by showing people sharing other videos online before even hinting at the message, and the rest of the narrative is very carefully constructed with virality in mind.

This adds a new dimension to the public narrative.  No longer is it only about the story of self, us and now as Ganz put it, but organizers now have the option of arranging all of those components as something that can go viral.  Whether or not they want to is an interesting question that warrants further study.  As Invisible Children’s CEO discussed in an NPR interview, their story grew so quickly that they were not ready to handle the consequences of such a large public spotlight.  While it may have backfired for Invisible Children, virality clearly is a powerful factor, for better or worse, that cannot be ignored when designing public narratives for a movement in the digital age.

Establish relationships: One on Ones

In this domain, the Kony 2012 campaign operated similarly to many campaigns before it.  They framed the issue in a way people can relate to with the spotlight on the filmmaker’s child and the message that “if this were to happen once in the US it would be on the cover of every single newspaper.” They went around talking to people about what was going on and they encouraged their followers to do the same.

A Team Approach: Build and Empower Teams

In this domain, Kony 2012 succeeded in cleverly packaging team-building around sharing Joseph Kony’s name into a digital product.  Their campaign sent out ‘action kits’ which gave activists posters and 2 bracelets, one for themselves and one to share, each containing a digital code.  This code gave them access to an online portal that would empower them to track the impact they were making on spreading the word.

Yet, at the same time the campaign failed in mobilizing people outside of the digital sphere or empowering them with the ability to do anything other than talk about the issue.  Lots of people shared and watched the videos, and many bought kits and donated to the organization.  Yet on the date of what was supposed to be the climax of the campaign known as ‘Cover the Night,’ people failed to organize in the real world. The teams that were leading the movement were not equipped or accustomed to being activists away from the comfort of their homes and their friends.  Followers of the movement would gladly share information, but the teams of activists were unable to motivate their followers when it came to taking as minimal an action as hanging up a poster. [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/21/kony-2012-campaign-uganda-warlord]

Form a Strategy: Learn and Adapt

Kony 2012 failed miserably in this domain.  They had a fantastically successful initial strategy which led to a viral explosion in interest.  Yet they were not ready for this viral explosion and they failed to adapt to the increased spotlight.  In 2014, Invisible Children, Inc shut down from the same causes which plagued the organization immediately after its initial success.

Take Action: Clear and Measurable Actions

In this domain, Kony 2012 was successful at creating clear and measurable actions for its followers, yet unsuccessful at aligning those actions with a strategy that would actually solve the problem.  They were certainly able to raise awareness, but awareness alone will not capture a warlord in central Africa.

The lessons of Kony 2012 are helpful for any organizer in the digital age.  Virality can be a double edged sword and if one attempts to unsheath it they should have some body armor ready to go.  On top of that, a campaign at this scale must also align the actions of its followers with meaningful progress that works towards solving the problem rather than awareness as an end of its own.

 

 

Which is more inclusive? Lawn Signs, Street Art or Bumper Stickers?

When I consider an inclusive civic technology, it must satisfy the following three criteria:

  1. The technology must be free to the end user.
  2. The technology must require minimal dependency costs.
  3. The technology must have minimal time and effort costs on its end users so that all people can use it regardless of their other time commitments or level of education.
  4. The technology must not have any norms about who uses it or why they use it so that nobody from any background is discouraged from using it.

With that in mind, let’s play with these criteria while examining three similar technologies: Lawn signs, street art and bumper stickers.  While all three of these technologies accomplish similar goals, to allow an end user to publicly display and endorse a cause that they want to promote, the way they enable their users to do so places them in different locations within our inclusivity space.

The first technology to consider is lawn signs.  With respect to the first of our criteria, lawn signs are frequently given out for free by the organizers of campaigns and movements.  This means that anyone who is in the vicinity of someone who is either a leader in a campaign/movement or is connected to a leader in a campaign/movement can likely get free access to them. So the upfront cost to the end user is zero.  Yet when we look at the second criterion, dependency costs, we see a different scenario.  Because lawn signs are mostly useless unless one has a lawn, the dependency cost is the cost of a lawn (ie property) which is actually very high.  With respect to the third criterion, the only effort required to use the technology is the amount of time required to push the sign into the ground.  And with respect to the fourth criterion, lawn signs do have some norms about who should be using them: those with lawns to put them in.  For those who don’t (the poor or even just those who live in apartments) a lawn sign is not a useful way to publicly endorse a cause.   For a politician to hand out a lawn sign, they are essentially saying “I’m handing this out to gain support among the land-owning class and nobody else.”

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/legacy_assets/articles/assets/PoliticalSignsRepub2.jpg

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/legacy_assets/articles/assets/PoliticalSignsRepub2.jpg

Another example that works toward the same goal is street art.  Various political movements hand out slogan bearing stencils to people with the hopes that they will use them to create street art which promotes their message.  Again, the cost of the technology is born by the movement organizer making it free to the end user. To use the technology, the end user does need to have access to some form of marking device (spray paint, chalk, etc).  While this is theoretically a dependency cost, it is extremely minimal so I’m not willing to exclude this from the category of inclusive for this reason.  Again, the time and effort cost are also minimal, as it really does require just the time it takes to hit a wall with spray paint or chalk.  Yet, this fails on our last category of inclusivity – it requires the end user to potentially break the law or reject certain values in order to be able to use it.  Even if it isn’t breaking the law, some may view the act of writing a message on a public space as disrespectful, even if in chalk.  By handing out stencils with political slogans, a movement leader is excluding those who may be against marking public spaces with their messages.  Thus, stencils and various other forms of street art do not fit my criteria for inclusive.

Source: http://s198.photobucket.com/user/zombiedollmaster/media/Aug131.jpg.html

Source: http://s198.photobucket.com/user/zombiedollmaster/media/Aug131.jpg.html

The last example is the civic technology of bumper stickers.  Bumper stickers are mostly free to the end user – politicians and leaders of political movements frequently cover the capital cost of printing stickers and hand them out for free as a means to promote their cause.  While the name ‘bumper stickers’ might suggest that there is a similar dependency cost caveat because they are only for those with cars, I argue that this does not apply because bumper stickers are very frequently placed on personal items that are not cars, many of which are extremely cheap or even free.  Bumper stickers also impose minimal time and effort costs on the end user – the only cost in this domain is the amount of time it takes to peel off the back and stick it to something that will be publicly viewed (the bumper of a car, a window, a street sign, etc).  Lastly, bumper stickers have no community or stigma associated with the technology itself as people from all backgrounds can be seen using them, meaning they won’t exclude anyone for social reasons.  Therefore, bumper stickers pass all of my criteria for being an inclusive civic technology.

Source: http://www.makestickers.com/image/makestickers/bumperPolitical.jpg

Source: http://www.makestickers.com/image/makestickers/bumperPolitical.jpg

These three civic technologies – bumper stickers, lawn signs and street art – all accomplish the same goals.  Yet the implications of using these technologies place them in very different locations within our inclusivity space, with only bumper stickers falling within the ‘inclusive’ boundary.

The Private Nudge Unit: Using Psychology to Combat Denialism in the Networked Public Sphere

My project proposal lays at the intersection of a couple different phenomena: discoveries in social psychology and behavioral economics, the prevalence of denialism on important issues in society and the emergence of the networked public sphere. To understand why, let’s look at each of these phenomena individually.

The Nudge Unit

In 2010, the UK government established the Behavioral Insights Team, colloquially dubbed ‘The Nudge Unit.’ Their goal was simple: save the UK government money. Yet the methods they used to accomplish that goal were far from simple: apply known theories and cognitive biases from psychology and behavioral economics to change the behavior of citizens without restricting their freedoms in any way.

Seems tough right? To see how the theory behind this works, let’s look at a contrived example that is used at the opening of Nudge, the book after which the Nudge unit was named. Look at the two tables below. Which one is longer?

table1

 

If you are like the overwhelming majority of the world, you would say the table on the left is longer than the table on the right.  If you were in a position where you had to place a bet on which table is longer, you would be crazy not to bet on the left.  Now take a ruler or a piece of paper and measure the sides.  To your astonishment, you will find that the dimensions of the table are exactly the same, as we can see in the rotated tabletops below:

table2

In visual illusions like the one above, the presence or absence of factors like rotation and the shape/angle of table legs bias human perception and lead to a predictable convergence in decisions that are made from the perceived information.  If you were betting on this, you would have lost money because of your bias in perception.  And if I were arranging this bet, I would know in advance that you were going to lose.

These sorts of cognitive biases are not limited to the visual system – they fundamentally underlie how humans think and act in the world.  The fields of social psychology, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have spent the past century developing a strong understanding of many of these cognitive biases.  The ‘Nudge Unit’ uses that understanding to influence the population of the UK to act in ways that save the government money by exploiting these cognitive biases to create a predictable convergence in decisions towards what the government thinks is best for the population.

Denialism

Let’s table the above information while we explore another contemporary issue: Denialism.   Before defining it, I’ll lay out a few of the most common examples: “HIV does not cause AIDS.  The world was created in 4004 BCE.  Smoking does not cause cancer.  And if climate change is happening, it is nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions,” [2].  Dangerous views like those listed above are surprisingly prevalent in society despite the overwhelming body of scientific evidence and consensus against them.  Denialism is a concept which attempts to understand that question and understand how rhetorical arguments can give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none.

Most scientists are baffled when they hear the numbers of people afflicted with Denialism.  A 2004 Gallop poll, for example, showed that 45% of Americans believed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” [3].  The knee-jerk response of most scientists confronted with such cases of Denialism is to attempt to respond with all of the facts explaining why the afflicted individual is wrong.  Interestingly, many studies have shown that this actually tends to reinforce the individual’s original beliefs rather than persuading them to consider other views [4][5].

So how does one combat this?  The answer seems to lie in the same type of research that the Nudge Unit relies on.  As The Debunking Handbook eloquently phrased it, “It’s not what people think that matters, but how they think,” [6].

The Networked Public Sphere

Let’s again entertain a different train of thought, keeping the other two in the back of our mind as we explore a set of issues that has previously been discussed in class: The Networked Public Sphere.  In the days following Robert McCulloh’s announcement of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, protests on the streets were accompanied by a lively debate on Twitter.  Emma Pierson, a reporter for Quartz, mapped out the conversation in the graph below:

twitter

Source: http://qz.com/302616/see-how-red-tweeters-and-blue-tweeters-ignore-each-other-on-ferguson/

In this image, red dots are active tweeters who describe themselves as “conservative” while the blue dots are active tweeters who describe themselves as “liberal.”  As we can see in the graph, they are mostly talking to themselves, reinforcing their own beliefs about the situation.  Pierson also points out that in the few cases of red dots interacting with blue dots, the interactions were far from civil. [7]

The Ferguson interactions on Twitter are an example of a more common trend that tends to emerge from social media: echo chambers.  People exhibit a confirmation bias which leads them to filter out information that is contrary to their viewpoints, yielding information and debates that proliferate within bubbles of like-minded people and convincing them that their views are ubiquitous throughout the world [8].

In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler proposes a theory on how information spreads throughout the topology of such a networked public sphere:

“Sites cluster around communities of interest… Local clusters – communities of interest – can provide initial vetting and “peer-review-like” qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster.  Observations that are seen as significant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger (“regional”) clusters.  This continues until an observation makes its way to the “superstar” sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use,” [9].

If Benkler’s theory is correct, this gives us some intuition as to how these echo chambers form and how they gain a growing influence within the networked public sphere.  Interestingly, Benkler’s theory also provides the basic roadmap of a mechanism to garner significant attention for a chosen argument within a networked public sphere: identify relevant communities of interest, infiltrate those communities and proliferate arguments that are likely to rise to the top of the cluster.

My Proposal: Facilitate ‘Networked Community Infiltration’ and Persuasion with the help of A Private Nudge Unit

So where am I going with all of this?  My hypothesis is that Benkler’s clustering effect is the cause of the perceived echo chambers.  If this is true, that means there may exist a mechanism to inject messages into those echo chambers.  And what if we could carefully design those messages such that they exploit cognitive biases in their readers?  And what if that echo chamber is a primary source of information for those afflicted with Denialism?

I’m proposing that we develop a civic media technology which enables individuals who care about the ramifications of Denialism to easily construct counter-information grounded in psychological principles and cognitive biases similar to The Nudge Unit.  A Private Nudge Unit which can be useful at an individual level instead of a government level.  Yet instead of setting defaults for behavior like the policies of The Nudge Unit, these arguments will shift defaults for thought in a population engrossed in misinformation which is fueling their thought.  There are a couple forms which this tool could take, but the overall purpose is to allow its users to understand some of the important psychological phenomena at play and provide a set of strategies for persuading different categories of people afflicted with Denialism.

Once we have such a tool, we could use Benkler’s theories on how information spreads throughout the networked public sphere to influence communities of Denialism in mass.  We can study these small but influential communities of interest which proliferate Denialism and understand what types of articles are likely to garner attention within them.  If we can understand that, we can then ‘infiltrate’ these networked communities by implanting articles into their echo chambers which we know will garner attention but also contain subtle mechanisms to create cognitive dissonance and shift how they think about the issue over time.

Is this extremely far-fetched?  Absolutely.  Will it work as planned?  Almost certainly not.  But if any progress is made with any of these components we may be one step closer towards combatting Denialism.  And in either case it would be fundamentally fascinating to attempt to understand and play with the complex mechanisms involved here.  And who knows, maybe it’ll even empower me to win my standard Thanksgiving political debate this year.

References

[1] Nudge – Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (2008)

[2] Denialism: What is it and How Should Scientists Respond? –  Pascal Diethelm , Martin McKee  (2009)

[3] Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory – Frank Newport (2004)

[4] Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs – Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006)

[5] There Must Be a Reason – Prasad, M., Perrin, A. J., Bezila, K., Hoffman, S. G., Kindleberger, K., Manturuk, K., et al. (2009)

[6] The Debunking Handbook – John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky (2011)

[7] See How Red and Blue Tweeters Ignore Each Other on Ferguson – Emma Pierson (2014)

[8] Homophily, Group Size, and the Diffusion of Political Information in Social Networks: Evidence from Twitter – Yosh Halberstam, Brian Knight (2014)

[9] The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler (2007)

Waze to Improve Roads and Track Citizens

One of the oldest services that governments have provided their citizens is the construction and maintenance of roads. To make life better for those who use roads, some of the most modern governments have begun using state of the art technology to notify drivers of their status, enabling them to plan around things like construction or traffic-causing accidents. One such high-tech solution can be seen below:

 

Source: http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Operations/Traffic/FAQs/PublishingImages/HAR_sign.jpg

Source: http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Operations/Traffic/FAQs/PublishingImages/HAR_sign.jpg

AM radio, a state of the art technology invented in 1900, is used by departments of transportation in many forward-thinking states to help drivers navigate treacherous traffic conditions. We can all think of multiple times in our lives where those helpful flashing lights have encouraged us to tune in on our AM radios for some time-saving advice. Another state of the art solution provided more commonly by governments is shown here:

Source: http://s3.freefoto.com/images/41/15/41_15_13_web.jpg

Source: http://s3.freefoto.com/images/41/15/41_15_13_web.jpg

Ok, you get the point. Government solutions to non-critical problems with their services (and even some critical ones) tend to be outdated, unreliable and generally unhelpful. They hardly solve the problem at all.

Waze is a Tel-Aviv based startup that was founded in 2008 with the goal of reliably providing traffic and road condition information in the absence of successful government solutions. They succeeded. Waze built a GPS navigation app which allows users to submit reports of everything from accidents to construction to police speed traps. They even partnered with Google and FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Sandy to allow reporting of gas stations that had fuel. Acquired by Google in June 2013 for $966M, Waze has over 36 million users who have shared over 90 million reports in over 110 countries [1].

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waze_3.5_Screen.png#mediaviewer/File:Waze_3.5_Screen.png

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waze_3.5_Screen.png#mediaviewer/File:Waze_3.5_Screen.png

When we evaluate Waze critically, we find that it is highly generative, data-centric and slightly encouraging of openness. It is highly generative because Waze’s users produce most of the valuable content on the platform with Waze simply enabling them to do so. The more users on the Waze platform, the more valuable it becomes for everyone else. It is data-centric because the data on Waze’s platform is their primary asset and the primary value-add for users. Waze is slightly encouraging of openness because it distributes information that used to be locked up in the minds of construction workers, emergency responders or individuals stuck in traffic to a larger group of people.

Yet one of the critical places where Waze scores extremely poorly is in the domain of preserving privacy and individual liberties. Waze’s demise in this category, like many modern internet companies, stems from their privacy policy regarding the information they collect on you. Before we go into that, we must begin with what specific information Waze collects:

  • “Detailed location and route information to create a detailed location history of all of the journeys you have made while using the Application”
  • “All of the phone numbers which are stored on your device’s phone book” (if you opt into the ‘find friends feature’)
  • Search queries within the Waze app [2]

Of course it is in Waze’s best interest to collect all of this information. They can use it to improve their own services, get a better understanding of their users and support their company financially through directed advertising. None of this is particularly onerous or damaging to individual liberties (at least in my opinion). Developing a better service is in all stakeholders best interest and a private company needs a strong business model to sustain the services it provides.

Where Waze strays away from protecting civil liberties is when it comes to how they are allowed use your data. One particularly onerous sections of their privacy policy and its implications are outlined below:

Waze will share your personal information with others without your consent “to comply with any applicable law and assist law enforcement agencies under any applicable law, when Waze has a good faith belief that Waze’s cooperation with the law enforcement agencies is legally mandated or meets the applicable legal standards and procedures,” [2]

Remember, if you are an active Waze user then Waze has a personal history of most places you’ve driven, places you are thinking about going and your live location if you have the app open. Operating on the assumption that governments always apply laws justly, this is not a problem. Unfortunately history has shown us that this assumption is frequently incorrect. And in that case, Waze provides these governments with a(nother) tool to track the exact whereabouts of Waze users of interest. As a digital trends article on the subject put it, “Anything you share with Waze can be used against you in a court of law,” [3].

Waze has also started negotiating deals with governments of places like Rio De Jeneiro and Florida to share data bi-directionally with departments of transportation [4]. While this is great for improving the services of both parties, it is a bad sign for user privacy that Waze is using private user data as a bargaining chip for better access to data from governments.

Since Waze scores so poorly in the privacy category, it begs the question: can such a platform exist that does better? Could a platform modeled after Benkler’s nonmarket peer-production concepts provide as effective of a service without compromising on privacy? While this is clearly an open question that deserves a deeper analysis, I believe that it can and it is a service that I would love to see in the world. Until then, it appears that as a privacy-concerned person I’m stuck tuning into my AM radio for my traffic information.

References:

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/06/nav-app-waze-says-36m-users-shared-900m-reports-while-65k-users-made-500m-map-edits/

[2] https://www.waze.com/legal/privacy

[3] http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/terms-conditions-waze-privacy-accident/#ixzz3U247x1Q9

[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/07/07/why-google-waze-helps-local-governments-track-its-users/

Quora

quora-habermas

Ahh the irony. Conversations about how Habermas’ notion of ‘The Public Sphere’ comes into play in the digital age… on a digital platform where communities can come together to discuss issues like whether or not digital platforms contribute to the notion of ‘The Public Sphere’.

Quora, although mentioned already in a previous blog post, seems to me like a great choice for a digital public sphere that does a good job in the categories of openness, rational discussion, civility, and equality. Where it seems to be lacking though is representativeness and, by extension, impact.

Quora, for those who may not be aware, is a simple question and answer platform launched in 2010. While not the first of its kind in platform, it seems to me that it is a first of its kind in community on top of such a platform. Quora is one of the few digital communities that I have been on that has almost always impressed me with the quality of discussion (to be fair, I have not actively participated in many digital communities). The average responses I have seen are essay-length and are usually deeply considered and rationally discussed. I have also yet to see a flame war, which is surprisingly impressive. The community also allows anyone who has a Facebook or Google account to answer, causing it to score highly in the openness category.

Yet, the reasons why Quora scores so highly in the above categories are also the reasons I think it will continue to score poorly in the representativeness category. Part of Quora’s initial success stems from incredibly high quality responses from well-known and well-respected people and the tone that those responses set within the initial community. Active initial users of the platform include Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Fred Wilson, Jimmy Wales and Ashton Kutcher. What made Quora different from Yahoo Answers were the people who were doing the answering and the quality of answers that stems from having those people as users.

Yet, if we take a step back and look at the primary communities represented on Quora, they in no way reflect the primary communities in the world. As shown in the map below, almost 70% of Quora’s user base stems from the United States and India, with little representation in large parts of the world. Outside of geography, the primary users of Quora extended out of the initial user base – Silicon Valley. Therefore, most users tend to be techies by the result of network effects. And, while the tech community seems to value equality in theory, in practice it is one of the least representative communities out there. Techies (at least in the US) are overwhelmingly White and Asian males from similar backgrounds and education levels [1] and Quora’s user base seems to extend from that.

Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com

Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com

Could representation on Quora change? Of course it could, but it may be unlikely and if it did happen it would likely change important aspects of the community. For example, the long-form intellectual style of Quora seems like it creates a selection bias on the education level of Quora’s user base. If Quora made an effort to branch out beyond the well-educated it would likely lose its primary distinguishing factor from other question and answer sites: high-quality intellectual content written by experts. It seems that what has made Quora successful is actually the same thing as what prevents it from being representative.

Because Quora is more of a niche community than a representative one, it scores poorly in the impact category as well. I chose to evaluate Quora’s impact on the public sphere in terms of the social capital it creates. Through such a lens, it is apparent that Quora is great at creating bonding social capital between experts in different fields but it fails miserably in creating bridging social capital. Yet bridging social capital, in my mind at least, is perhaps the most impactful thing that a digital community could create. The digital age is so unique because we have the technology to communicate with anyone from any background at any time so long as they have some access to a network. Digital platforms that take advantage of this are truly unlike anything we have seen before in civilization. Yet, those that don’t seem to resemble digital versions of the social groups and clubs that have existed in society long before the internet. While this doesn’t make platforms like Quora bad, it certainly reduces their impact.

In short, Quora is a great community of experts who civilly and rationally discuss intellectually engaging topics. But, the feature that enables Quora to have such positive traits also creates a relatively homogeneous community with respect to the greater society, weakening the impact of Quora as a platform.

References:

[1] Disparities in STEM Employment by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf

The Sunday Assembly: Church without Dogma

According to a Pew Research poll, the share of Americans who claim no particular religion went from 7% in the 1990s to 20% in 2012 (and 33% within the 18-30 demographic) [1]. This massive trend away from religiosity in America’s youth poses an interesting challenge for civics. In America, religion has always been about more than God – the church (used here and for the rest of this post in the metonymic sense) has been the center of American communities since the founding of the country and the primary place where moral norm-setting and intergenerational interactions occurred. If we look at some of our proudest civic movements in the history of America – the abolition of slavery, the passage of the nineteenth amendment, the civil rights movement – the church seems to have played an integral role as a center for community organizing and political debate around social issues. So what happens in an America where the church no longer exists as the center for social, moral and political discussion?

religion-stats

Source: http://issi.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/shared/docs/Hout%20et%20al_No%20Relig%20Pref%202012_Release%20Mar%202013.pdf

The Sunday Assembly appears to be a promising attempt to fill that void. A movement started in 2013 by two London-based comedians, it has since grown to 28 assemblies consisting of thousands of people across the world. According to their website, The Sunday Assembly is an organization “dedicated to helping the people that attend, and the folk in the wider community, to make the most of this one life that we know we have.” In essence, they are all of the aspects of a church community minus God. Church hymns are replaced with pop songs, bible verses with science, philosophy and poetry. All of the content of The Sunday Assembly’s services fits into one of their broader themes: to live better, to help often and to wonder more.

sunday-assembly

Source: http://sundayassembly.com/

It is still too early to tell how successful this movement will be. Alas, the first service I would have gone to was cancelled due to the absolutely beautiful weather we’ve been having here in Boston so I have yet to experience a service for myself.

Yet the core tenets of The Sunday Assembly – community, celebration, a sense of altruism – are all intentionally identical to the core tenets of the prototypical church community. So the question then becomes do these components need God to function? Do they function because they are inherently valuable? Or do they rest on the fact that the church already has a group of people who have a strong commitment to each other and an assumption that they share deeply intimate characteristics in common?

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but my hypothesis is that God doesn’t have to be involved in the building of such a community. The group of people who would potentially be members of The Sunday Assembly actually does have a lot of deeply intimate characteristics in common and those traits will come to the forefront in such a setting. The act of being interested in such a community likely means they have rejected the formal religious institutions that have surrounded them for the majority of their lives. It also means they have likely spent much of their life dealing with the societal and social consequences of making such a choice. They are the people that sometimes envy the religious communities of others when they gather to celebrate religious holidays. They are the people that worry their children may feel left out during holiday season, and question whether or not they are depriving their children of a life experience by not introducing them to religion simply because of their own personal convictions against it.

There are deep emotional commonalities among the target audience for The Sunday Assembly. For that reason I believe the Sunday Assembly model will be successful and will become an important replacement for the church community in an age of decreasing religiosity. And in doing so, I think it will also take the place of the church as the center of community and, by extension, civic discussion and social change.

 

References:
[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/19/event-transcript-religion-trends-in-the-u-s/

I’ll Believe It When I See It: The Democratization of Credibility

On March 3 1991, a manager at a plumbing and rooting company by the name of George Holliday awoke to sirens outside of his Los Angeles apartment. With the help of a Sony Handycam, Holliday began filming what would soon become fodder for national protests, riots and debates – the beating of Rodney King by multiple officers of the Los Angeles Police Department. After receiving unsatisfactory information from the police about why the star of his video was brutally assaulted, Holliday decided to bring the video to a local news station, KTLA-TV. The result of this decision, made by a manager at a small plumbing company who happened to be in the right place at the right time, have become embedded within history textbooks and racial debates ever since.

With the act of placing the Rodney King footage in the public sphere, George Holliday arguably became the first widely influential citizen journalist. By citizen journalist, I mean an average citizen, unaffiliated in any way with the formal institutions of journalism, who saw something of journalistic importance and took it into his own hands to distribute unbiased and reliable information on the matter.

What is critically important in the Holliday situation is the medium through which he reported the incident: live video of the incident itself. The old adage ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ holds a lot of weight. People tend to believe and deeply internalize something which they can see with their own eyes. By engaging the human vision apparatus, video footage of humans activates empathic responses within other humans. There is evidence to suggest that this is the result of the way we internally process vision. Psychological research points us towards the idea that we actually simulate what we are seeing within our mind as a core part of seeing – and if we are seeing a person we also tend to simulate what it would be like to be a person in their situation (i.e. empathy) [1]. This tie to emotion in conjunction with the fact that video is difficult to doctor believably, means that video can also be held to a higher standard of intrinsic truth than a traditional eyewitness report and therefore carries much higher amounts of persuasive information.

With 8 minutes of video at 30 frames per second, George Holliday was able to capture 14,400 images (or, if we accept the ‘image is worth 1000 words’ adage, the equivalent of 14,400,000 words or 163 copies of Plato’s Republic) about police brutality and racial injustice in America. 14,400 images which, in the absence of formal reporting, were previously available only to those living within the communities where such injustices were readily present.

George Holliday’s case represents the beginning of a fundamental shift in humanity’s storytelling capabilities. The importance of this shift cannot be understated enough. It is so important because such a shift changes who is able to tell credible stories. It separates reputation and public perception of a storyteller from the content of the story they are telling. For most of human history, one had to depend on the reputation of the author of a story to make a judgment about the credibility of the story they were telling. The journalism industry was built out of this need for reputation-based credibility. Such a dynamic also meant that unless one was in a position within society where attaining a position of credibility was possible, one’s voice could easily be muted by those who were already in such societal positions.

We now live in an age where this is no longer the case. According to a 2013 report on the mobile phone industry there are approximately 4.4 billion mobile phones equipped with cameras in the world [2]. Almost two thirds of the world now has the ability to create and disseminate reliable information in their pocket at all times. In this new age, one can have credibility without the need for reputation. Such a democratization of credibility will have profound impacts on how democracies operate and the power balances within those democracies by changing whose voice is perceived as credible.

In 2014, Eric Garner was filmed being choked to death by a police officer, sparking national outrage. The man filming the incident was Ramsey Orta – a man who would later face criminal charges for an incident of weapons possession unrelated to the Garner case. Yet, because the controversy around Eric Garner was based on video, Orta’s personal reputation is irrelevant to the story and Garner’s case remains one of the most irrefutable examples of American police brutality in recent memory. Contrast this with the Michael Brown case which occurred around the same time but had an eyewitness testimony that was quickly discredited by the reputation (and by extension credibility) imbalance of the witnesses arguing for and against the officer who shot Brown.

From Rodney King to Eric Garner, injustices are being exposed and brought to the public light by those who previously were not considered reputable enough for their testimonies to be considered credible. Citizen journalists now have the tools to irrefutably report on the world around them, regardless of their background or position in society. What this means for democracy is yet to be determined, but it is hard to believe that it won’t fundamentally shift the balance of power in democracies across the globe.

References:
[1] See simulation theory within the psychology literature
[2] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/03/the-annual-mobile-industry-numbers-and-stats-blog-yep-this-year-we-will-hit-the-mobile-moment.html