It is nearly impossible to find a single inclusive civic technology that suits all my needs. This is because some needs may conflict with others, and additional attributes are needed for a technology to survive and reach a critical mass. Hereby I will provide the “shopping list” for civic technologies and potential candidates in this civic technology competition.

1. This technology needs to be cheap enough so people from most social classes can afford.

2. This technology needs to be easy enough to use, with nearly zero learning curve so there won’t be a huge gap between new comers and veteran users.

3. This technology should suit all kinds of personalities. Outgoing people and introvert people should get similar quality of experience; the same applies to people fat and thin, female and male, quiet and active, young and old.

4. This technology should equalize new players, which means new comers won’t get too much advantage because of their economic or social capital in the real world.

5. This technology should have a anti-monopoly mechanism. The rich in the system won’t get richer too fast than the poor.

Beside these equality requirements, the system need to be “civic” – which means it needs to have the potential to reach civic goals. Therefore this shopping list continues with follows:

6. This technology should be participatory. It should be able to foster dialogs among participants. And although it is allowed to form local communities, but it shouldn’t go too far that people only talk to their peers in their local groups.

7. This technology should be able to make an impact, no matter it’s forming a consensus among its participants or bring changes to the real world.

8. This technology should be democratic. The purpose of the technology should not be promoting some certain ideas. The reward system should not prefer one set of ideas while discouraging another.

9. This technology should be creative. Participants should be able to experiment freely with in the system: create new ideas, and remix with existing ideas.

And finally:

10. This technology should survive and thrive. If it is a public project, it should have easy and clear maintenance procedures; if it is run by companies or organizations, it should have a business model to keep the system alive.

Here are some instances that may suite some parts of the criteria:

1. Songs/Music. Songs are affordable, have a great penetration in all kinds of marginal communities. Songs are easy to remix, or one can just change part of their lyrics to express their ideas. Certainly there are good singers or bad singers, but you don’t need to record a perfect version to create some influence. There are already many songs on politics, and they frequently appears in events such as protests. The problem with songs is that it cannot convey dialog – you can either follow the crowd or refuse to listen to them.

2. Cameras. Cameras are good at monitoring the environment, and they are native storytelling machines. Cameras today are affordable and usually preinstalled in most phones. Most people can use a camera without proper training. It doesn’t have penalty on any specific personality type, and in terms of news photos, the gap between professional photographer and amateurs are shrinking. However, the photo ecosystem still rely on editors to filter “good” photos from mediocre ones. Traditional media power structure still work on these new devices.

3. Radio. Radio seems to be a traditional media, but it runs perfectly in a local community. When used properly, it is easy to generate discussion within a community and have everybody’s opinion represented. However, as media consumption habit change over time, there are fewer people listening to radio and this diminishes its inclusiveness.

4. Apps, particularly Facebook, Line, and Wechat. Owning a smart phone seems to be prestigious five years ago, but is not any more since the price went down so rapidly, and it is foreseeable that they will be the standard equipment for people from all social classes. The problem with these tools is that those who got a hand on social media skills always have an advantage in using these tools.

5. Scratch and alike. Scratch is a tool developed by Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT Media Lab. It is used in science classes at schools, and it encourages expression and experiment at the first place. The current user base is small, but it is possible that after several generations these tools might be as popular as Facebook or Wechat. Only by then can we see whether they follow the same fate as social media.

Creating usable, flexible, and inclusive platforms for civic media remains an incipient struggle; any working example even halfway close to the ideal civic technology is at least a couple decades’ worth of design innovations and adaptation hurdles away. Nevertheless, a good idea of what this might entail can be garnered by sampling extant creations that perform remarkably well for certain functions. The resulting chimera that would emerge from assembling these various traits would be somewhat similar to what you would expect: inclusive towards all parties, adaptable to user needs, decentralized to some degree, and easily integrable with other platforms.

As internet access proliferates even among demographics with low incomes, greater importance is placed on the quality of use rather than availability of connection. Users may be separated into several tiers; a grossly generalized distinction would be between regular browsers, content creators, and developers. A truly inclusive platform would seek to engage users from all these categories – by making the code open source, allowing for content creation, fostering social connections, and allowing public access to datasets. Most contemporary platforms exhibit some of these elements. Flickr, for example, has an easy to use API to allow for analysis of a formidable collection of photos, and also serves as a social site for photographers to congregate and share content. All the code, however, is written by Yahoo engineers, potentially depriving the site from innovations that would arise from open development.
Although inclusiveness is vital to a civic project, it should not come at the cost of effectiveness and organization. Large open source endeavors such as GNU/Linux operate with hierarchies that allow for contributions from thousands of people to coalesce into working products. Hierarchies of management, as long as they are transparent and supported by users, are often not only boons, but necessities. Striking a balance between top-down management and decentralization is difficult, but not impossible. The Wikipedia model seeks to have editors reach a consensus on most disagreements on their own; several levels of moderators, and at the highest echelon, the Arbitration Committee, are ready to step in should tensions escalate. Anyone familiar with Wikipedia knows such a system has its flaws, but the idea of having supervisors interfere only when necessary is appealing as it combines the benefits of stricter hierarchies with those of unguided collaboration.

Perhaps the most important quality a project could have is knowledge of the place it occupies in the media ecosystem. Developers who are acutely aware of this design platforms that focus on a few specific things, instead of attempting to accomplish disparate objectives. This, however, is not enough. An effort must be made to allow maximum integration with other projects and tools that exist, taking advantage of the increased ease of use and output potential that results from creating suites of tools. Having user interfaces that follow a standard or set of guidelines or making available APIs that provide for integration multiplies the effectiveness of tools by removing the learning curve necessary for users and developers as they move from project to project. In the end, this is the larger picture – a media environment that is organic, allows for fluid movement, and which meets the needs of the many by being a seamless web of smaller elements.

Social networks are pervasive in modern human communication, and they typically provide the same or similar affordances. Speaking, liking, sharing, commenting. These provide for the very basic contours of conversation, with options for limited non-verbal engagement. So limited in fact, that expressing negativity or disagreement non-verbally is not an option. These choices are made delicately, and are tangled up with the company’s bottom line. Take for instance the Facebook decision to avoid including a “Dislike” button. It justifies this decision based on a philosophy that it would not be good for the world at large, however these choices, which are likely made more based on what is profitable, dramatically influence what kind of conversations take place. “Its algorithms optimize for ‘engagement’, which includes posts, likes, clicks, shares, and comments. Among the metrics Facebook does not optimize for: honesty, exchange of ideas, critical thinking, or objective truth.” [1]

There are an infinite number of affordances one could imagine for nudging and steering the direction of discourse, and largely these remain unexplored. What also remains unexplored (at least in implementation) are the ends to which these affordances could be applied. The solution space for directing discourse is not even limited to accessible user affordances. Technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis, while imperfect, can help to craft conversations that are better informed and contextualized, more respectful, and more reactive to what is said and how participants behave. In addition, non-technical information design choices hold potential for instance in crafting a civil and equalitarian environment for discussion and debate by enforcing identification of users; what is called the “Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects” or “SIDE”. [2] Decisions like these have significant ramifications for participation [3] and risks exclusion of groups that are typically targeted with hate speech and need anonymity as a matter of personal safety. In addition to questions around identity, networked information access influences the experience of discourse and deliberation online, particularly in large networks. A number of studies support the idea that “as one’s network size increases, the probability of interaction with sources of new information grows, since one is more likely to encounter a higher number of politically active individuals.” [4] In current popular models of interaction on social networks, these networks (subject to the privacy configuration choices of the user) frequently require a commitment to other individuals in the network, usually a formalized “friendship” that allows the users to see each other’s contributions and interact.

It cannot be understated how much care (and transparency) is required in crafting these environments and tools. Brought to scale, as we have seen with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, a large percentage of communications of the human race can be affected, and it is not always clear what the ultimate repercussions of these effects are. If users of a system do not understand how what they see and how they are seen by others is manipulated (and manipulation is the appropriate term here), their world view can be skewed based on the invisible decisions of the algorithm responsible for manipulation. In the case of Facebook’s “curatorial” algorithms for users’ news feeds, (the site’s primary interface for information delivery) some research suggests as high as 62.5% of users at the time of the study were unaware their news feed was being filtered. [5]

I propose Shifter, a model for a social network that supports values of exposure to alternate perspectives, patience, and expansion of understanding, and which leverages a non-static model of social relationships, in addition to other affordances that encourage respect and the ability to navigate difficult subject matter while minimizing social friction. In this model, users relinquish the almost universally assumed ability to choose who they are connected to in the network. Instead, a shuffling algorithm would modify the network based on properties self-identified by each user, in addition to interactions and ratings generated through discourse that happens on the site itself, and mediated by the chosen tolerance each user sets for exposure to individuals with opinions divergent from their own. An effect of this shuffling is that the potential interactions with various individuals and viewpoints on the network dramatically increases. In addition to participation in conversations via the social network, users will also be allowed to create prompts for other users to help define their position on a variety of contentious issues. These variables would allow for a much higher resolution of identity than typical dichotomies like “liberal” and “conservative”, which force users into camps that carry a lot of (frequently inappropriate) baggage and assumptions. The hope is that such a network could provide a deeper understanding into the complex political and ideological identities typically unrecognized in much modern political discourse.

Restrictions on speech and user agency can be extremely problematic when the social network represents a generalized and significantly sized digital public sphere, however constrained social environments with specific goals and values provide opportunity for experimentation with affordances that may or may not work at scale. In addition, they provide the ability for subaltern counterpublics to have socio-technical affordances designed with their specific issues in mind, something that could never be done across a large and diverse digital community. Ultimately, the goal of bridging gaps of misunderstanding, and the possibility of progress around social issues that result in even greater societal ills is what the structure of this network aims to accomplish.

1. “You Can’t Dislike This Article”. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/12/facebook_dislike_button_why_mark_zuckerberg_won_t_allow_it.html

2. “Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_identity_model_of_deindividuation_effects

3. “Facebook Apologizes To LGBT Community And Promises Changes To Real Name Policy”. http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/01/facebook-apologizes-to-lgbt-community-and-promises-changes-to-real-name-policy/

4. “Social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? Exploring the affordances of Facebook and YouTube for political expression”. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563212002762

5. “Uncovering Algorithms: Looking Inside the Facebook News Feed”. https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/uncovering-algorithms-looking-inside-the-facebook-news-feed

The Great Recession has nominally ended but faith in the economy remains to be restored. Shaken by the experiences of previous years, many Americans have begun to seek alternatives to the standard U.S. dollar, citing the advantages of autonomy and insulation from the national market. Of these non-standard currencies, the one that has received by far the most attention from the press has been Bitcoin, due to the controversy surrounding its facilitation of less than legal online transactions.

Less well-known but equally noteworthy are the numerous local currencies that have begun to crop up across the United States. Whether existing in physical form as bills and coins or purely in electronic denominations, they are circulated only locally and are accepted as forms of payment by neighborhood establishments. Common arguments for their existence are centered around the importance of the community. The inability for their value to be transferred to places outside of their point of origin serves to both encourage investment in local businesses and buffer the local economy from volatility on the national level. Such currencies can also prove to be a boon for those unemployed by increasing the purchasing power of individuals and thus encouraging the hiring of more people. Other advantages differ with the ways in which the currency is implemented. Japan, for example, has a form of currency called the “Fureai kippu,” which can only be obtained by assisting the elderly; accumulated credits are stored until the owner is a senior citizen, at which point he or she can use them to pay for services rendered by other elderly or younger individuals. Time-based monetary systems also exist, in which hours of labor are traded within the community. The premise of these two latter cases in particular is that apart from serving as an economic device, such currencies also are valuable civic tools that encourage members of the community, especially youth, to interact with their neighbors and take up civic roles and duties.

Having a community currency available as a supplement to federal dollars therefore provides opportunities for a myriad number of ways in which to encourage civic involvement, cohesion among neighbors, and the growth of small businesses. However, it’s unlikely that any one implementation of an alternative monetary system would satisfy the various needs of many different communities. I therefore propose a platform that would allow local governments and communities to easily create and distribute their own form of electronic currency. The specifics of how the currency is backed and generated, as well as the terms of exchange between it and federal currency, would be left open to allow for adaptation to the unique circumstances that face each town. In its most simple form the tool would be an app that serves as an e-wallet and indicates stores and job listings that deal with the currency. A more complicated and holistic version would consist of a suite of tools to allow for the basic infrastructure of the system to take hold. Possibilities would include QR codes that could be printed onto an ID or paper that would identify wallets and allow money to be exchanged from individual to individual or a range pre-coded options dealing with how the currency is generated (hours of labor, exchanged from federal currency, etc). With the success of some current models such as the BerkShares model, many communities could hopefully develop alternative spheres of exchange that satisfy both economic and social needs.

When I was coming up with an idea for a case study, I did not have an idea as to what I wanted to analyze. I began to play some of my favorite songs and started to perform research on some issues I believed interested me. Then it hit me; why not research the very thing that I am using to inspire me, music. Whenever I am looking for an idea or need something just to get my mind flowing, I always turn to music. If music was this powerful, why not use it as a platform to inspire change? Of course, I am not the first person to think about this; in fact, various groups look at music as the main tool for change. The purpose of this case study would be to analyze these groups and examine just how much of an impact they have all over the world.

While performing this study, I do not intend to analyze famous musicians’ charity organizations or social change groups. Even though these are part of activism through music, I want to focus specifically more on the music side. I want to analyze the songs created by various artists, the messages of the songs and how much of an influence these songs had on society. For instance, the anti-war songs made by musicians of the 1960s helped motivate a generation to fight against war around the world. Even today, bands like Pussy Riot create songs that look to bring about change by having people listen to them.

      http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19303187

Even though popular artists may make up the bulk of activism through music, I especially want to look at the influence of music at a civilian level. For my case study, the impact civilians have by using music can be broken down into two levels. The first way is the exact same way that I mentioned for popular artists. Thanks to websites like YouTube, the average person can become an overnight sensation by creating a song that has a strong message. The second way is to analyze the ways music gets people to galvanize while supporting a common cause. For example, an event called HONK! uses music at the civilian level to inspire change. Located here right in Massachusetts, this event gets street bands and other musicians to perform in a fashion similar to parades. In the process, HONK! protests violence and oppression. Their message has even expanded to other places within the US. PRONK!, a similar event held near Brown University in Providence, was created on the same premise as HONK!. More can be found about HONK! at http://honkfest.org/.

     http://www.boston.com/thingstodo/gotoit/2012/10/honk_festival_o.html

The last part of my case study looks to see just how reliable music is for inspiring social change or any other message for that matter. I want to see just how much music influences people. Through the use of past data and surveys, I want to see whether or not a powerful song can inspire someone to take action, and if so, whether certain topics would be more likely to garner civilian support.

 

As the network speeds of a region’s cellular data infrastructure increase, so does the viability of livestreaming quality video from a mobile phone. From the US to Ukraine and beyond people are increasingly using livestreaming to document and report on local events. My final project will look at a subset of livestreamers, who I identify as “civic livestreamers,” and describe a new platform I have been researching and designing to augment and enhance their efforts to distribute information that is relevant to the public sphere. I will argue that current streaming platforms have poor viewing experiences, and that engagement and participation could be increased through re-imagining livestreaming from a civic perspective.

My final project will have several components, the first of which will be an analysis of how we might conceptualize the activities of these civic livestreamers. From the broadcaster, co-participant, and viewer perspectives, how does this activity fit with traditional conceptions of the media, professional journalism, independent journalism, citizen journalism, and documentary? Civic livestreaming is partly an act of disintermediation, as streamers refuse to cede representational and narrative authority to the mainstream media, preferring to create their own narratives and video footage. This view is supported through interviews with livestreamers and their statements on social media. In this sense civic livestreaming seems to be part of a response to the failure of traditional media outlets to cover certain events, or a dispute over how certain events are portrayed.

For co-participants, civic livestreaming is a more contested activity. There is concern that livestreamers may be informants (knowingly or unknowingly), and there is an unwillingness to cede narrative authority to a single co-participant. There is also some belief that livestreamers care more about their viewing audience than their co-participants and that they expose participants to greater risk of arrest. This complicates the civic function of livestreamers and is worth examining in more detail. Further research will also be required to understand whether a significant portion of viewers of civic livestreams are actively engaged in seeking out alternative narratives about an event, or if they are simply looking for the more immediate and authentic experience of an event that is enabled by livestreaming.

After looking at conceptual frames for civic livestreaming from various perspectives I will also consider how effective it can be at creating change. Part of this relates to the difference between having a voice and having influence or power. I will examine how civic livestreamers try to increase their influence, and whether there are examples of change resulting from livestreaming. Some of the influence or power of civic livestreaming may also be based on the possibility of documenting human rights violations. Is such documentation an effective way to create change?

A third component of my project will be a close look at existing streaming platforms, considering whether they succeed or fail in creating communities based on civic values and principles of the networked public sphere, including increasing participation, openness, transparency, and interaction. These same values will be used to discuss design principles and features of my proposed platform. As an example, interaction on existing streaming platforms like Livestream.com and UStream.tv currently consists of a chat window (if the broadcaster enables chat), a Twitter feed (also if configured), and the ability to share a url of the stream on popular social media platforms. There is also various social-media-type functionality built into these platforms, for example if users create an account, they can “follow” and “like.” As discussed below, my platform can incorporate these features, but also creates new categories of interaction and participation.

I will include a description and prototype of my proposed platform, which seeks to enhance the experience of watching a livestream by creating a way for someone to add relevant contextual information to a stream. This information might include tweets or hashtags, blog posts or news stories, maps or timelines for key events, or even music, images, or gifs related to the event. In this sense it creates a new role in the streamer-viewer ecosystem, that of the curator. I will examine the values embedded in this role, which includes extending the sphere of participation in a livestream event beyond what current platforms allow. Curators are likely to be people who are sufficiently interested in, and motivated by, the events in a civic livestream that they want to contribute to the public perception and discussion of what is happening beyond sharing it on social media. This creates an opportunity to participate in a meaningful way for people who are unable to join the event either because of physical distance or other reasons.

The design process for this website includes interviews with people who both broadcast and watch livestreams. In addition to seeking to understand some of the motivations for these activities, I will also ask some streamers to suggest specific features they would like to see, and what features they don’t like in existing platforms. Paper prototyping for the platform involved scenario-based co-design with two individuals. This falls short of a full participatory design process, and final decisions will be made by the design team, but it does value user input from an early stage and will incorporate user feedback throughout the design process.

Civic livestreams are an emotionally engaging way to watch important events, but the user experience on current sites is poor. There is limited opportunity to participate, streams are hard to find, and viewers often start searching for further information about the event shortly after they start watching, leaving the streaming site and browsing elsewhere. The platform I discuss for my final project aims to increase viewing time and viewer engagement by including an authoring platform where information can be added to a livestream. This creates the possibility of wider participation and increased impact. It also creates a more direct ladder of engagement for livestreaming, where people can move from being passive viewers to active contributors, even if they are not physically present where events are happening. It therefore promotes the ideal that anyone who can livestream can create their own narrative of an event, that this narrative can be amplified and supported by other people without mainstream media, and that people can thereby bring attention to events they feel are important, enriching the networked public sphere with new perspectives and information from events that mainstream media may misrepresent or simply does not cover.

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?

 

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:

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:

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)

I would like to propose a system for collaborative analysis of datasets important to large publics.

We are in the age of big data – sensors and trackers are everywhere, whether in physical locations or in software applications, and they generate huge volumes of data. A large variety of tools have been built to deal with the data explosion, in particular systems for data storage and computation across a cluster of computers. However, many of these tools require deep understanding of programming and computer systems, and are difficult for casual data analysts to use. More recently, there have been web-based frontends for these complex systems developed for nontechnical analysts, but they are expensive and need to be set up by an IT staff on a company’s own computers. In short, there are few freely available, easily accessible (e.g. web-based) tools for recreational data analysts, probably because this demographic is too small for it to be the focus of a for-profit venture.

When we turn to datasets of broad public interest, though, it seems likely that there is a widespread desire among Americans – if not a means of a monetizing this desire – to analyze the data for themselves and draw their own conclusions. For example, anonymized U.S. census data is freely available, and there are numerous interesting questions that could be asked of it. What is the average age of the residents in every state? What about average income? It seems likely that there are analyses of census data that could yield shocking results about inequality or other matters and could spur citizens to action. I see such analyses as a type of civic journalism, one that is spare on prose and lets the data speak for itself. There are numerous other datasets that could be of similar civic value, including the Reference Energy Disaggregation Dataset on home energy usage, congressional voting records, and anonymized healthcare records.

So it seems the time is right for a collaborative web-based data analysis platform. The existing system most similar to what I propose is called DataHub (http://datahub.csail.mit.edu/www/), a research project from MIT CSAIL. It is a sort of GitHub for data – it allows users to upload datasets and other users to create their own copies of these datasets that they can play with and modify independently. It also has a powerful plugin system that allows users to write applications that can operate on datasets – for example, programs to clean up datasets (e.g. by identifying typographical errors and correcting them), to convert datasets from one format to another (unstructured to tabular), to run specialized analyses like machine learning algorithms and visualizations on the data, and more. This is exciting – as more and more people use the system, the number of applications available for it and the power of the analyses that can be performed will grow. As a computer science research project, DataHub focuses more on technical ideas like minimizing data duplication, and is less concerned with potential societal impacts. This is where I would like to come in.

I think the pieces missing from DataHub that would be particularly useful for civic datasets are comment sections for every data analysis, which would allow other users to chime in and discuss methodological issues with or potential implications of analyses. In addition, I think a news-like component would be interesting, with very popular analyses or datasets surfaced on the front page and potentially even articles written about them. This would support the idea of data-driven civic journalism.

Just to provide a visual of what the part of the system devoted to data analysis might look like, I’ve included a screenshot of Paxata, a commercial system for dataset cleaning: