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.

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