I reached out to friends at Center for Civic Media about how much I’ve been hearing lately about folk wanting to “pop communication bubbles.” A bunch of these (and Berkman) folk have been working on things like that for a long time, and have some excellent things to share in regards to our attempts, successes, failures. This is a near-exact transposition of their response to my prompt. Platforms which already try to bridge political (or other) differences:
- http://perspectiveapi.com/
- Mic.com, which started as PolicyMic but pivoted / gave up
- Wael Ghonim’s https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/inside-parlio-egyptian-activist-wael-g…
- Systems that give people feedback on their news reading behavior (most haven’t worked very well)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview
A review of these systems is in
- Matias, J. N., Szalavitz, S., Zuckerman, E. (2017) FollowBias: Supporting BehaviorChange Toward Gender Equality by Networked Gatekeepers on Social Media.In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer Supported CooperativeWork & Social Computing. ACM Press, 2017 http://natematias.com/media/research/FollowBias_CSCW_2017-Matias-Szalavi…
- Sean A. Munson, Stephanie Y. Lee, and Paul Resnick.2013. Encouraging Reading of Diverse Political Viewpoints with a Browser Widget.. In ICWSM.http://dub.uw.edu/djangosite/media/papers/balancericwsm-v4.pdf
- Q. Vera Liao and Wai-Tat Fu. 2014. Can you hear menow?: mitigating the echo chamber effect by sourceposition indicators. In Proceedings of the 17th ACMconference on Computer supported cooperative work &social computing. ACM, 184–196.http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2531711
- D’Ignazio, Catherine. 2014. Engineering serendipity : TerraIncognita and other strange encounters with global news.Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/95597
- Siamak Faridani, Ephrat Bitton, Kimiko Ryokai, and KenGoldberg. 2010. Opinion space: a scalable tool for browsing online comments. In Proceedings of theSIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in ComputingSystems. ACM, 1175–1184. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753502
- Matias, J. Nathan, Elena Agapie, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Erhardt Graeff. (2014) Challenges for Personal Behavior Change Research on Information Diversity. Workshop on Personalized Behavior Change, at The 32nd ACM Conference onHuman Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’14). http://http://personalizedchange.weebly.com/position-papers/challenges-f…“bad url”]
https://unfold.com/ breaks news into simple statements, lets users vote their opinion Things which indicate how great Amber is and that it should be used, but I bet were great when they led somewhere: