Creating Technology for Social Change

POLL: Would you read a weekly email that challenges your beliefs?

The product: You take a basic quiz to see where you fall on the spectrum of ideologies. Then, once a week, you get an email featuring a carefully selected reading or video that may challenge your political beliefs, but is otherwise intelligent and thought-provoking.

Would you sign up for such a service?

The inspiration:
In The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser warns that internet companies are personalizing our online experiences so effectively that we risk surrounding ourselves with nothing but digital yes-men. The result, paired with cable news stations that only need to appeal to the partisan extremes, is a customized echo chamber that endangers democracy. You’ve seen this argument before.

Eli provides some tips on beating the algorithms at their game, but these are limited technical solutions in the face of the powerful-but-invisible forces of personalization he describes. We also see an argument for a return to human editors. Eli notes in his TED talk, “The algorithms don’t yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the human editors did.” We need to be served content that is not just relevant, he says, but also important, uncomfortable, challenging.

Maybe what we really need are better serendipity engines. StumbleUpon grew immensely popular because it brought back the the web’s original sense of excitement and exploration at a time when the internet was becoming more mature and commercialized. I’ll argue not only that being exposed to new influences is healthy for our minds, but also that there’s already high demand for it.

I’m an information addict, like most of the internet’s early adopters and Twitter’s heavy users. I’d tell you I don’t own a TV, but I don’t want you to hate me (plus, I cheat and watch Hulu). So, I’m keenly aware that I don’t fit into the media consumption patterns of the general population.

All of the network analyses I’ve read describe the internet, blogs, and Twitter as places where practically everyone links to the same few voices, and where we all hear only what they already believed. Statistically, power laws make sense. But the end result doesn’t jive with my experience. No, I don’t start every morning with Fox News or Alternet just to be different. But over time, getting my news and political opinions from the web for the last 15 years has endlessly broadened my perspective, exposed me to new sources, and yes, influenced my beliefs with thoughtbombs I never would have otherwise come across. This effect is all the more exaggerated when I compare what my media diet would look like if that time had been replaced by televised news, and the ridiculous caricatures of political identity portrayed there.

Of course, what we believe politically may have significantly more to do with our individual lives and the experiences we’ve had than the articles we read. But I’d like to test a few things. I’d like to see if there is genuine interest in considering (intelligent) voices that don’t echo our own. And I’d like to see what people do with such influences, which can only happen once you tell me if you’re interested.