Eric Gilbert, a 2009 Google Fellow, and his colleagues at Illinois Urbana-Champaign devised an empirical study to test whether blogs isolate readers from dissenting opinions by comparing the ratio of agreeing to disagreeing comments in several top blogs. They write that
As early as 1996, Nicholas Negroponte theorized about The Daily Me, a newspaper perfectly tailored to your individual tastes and preferences. Nothing appears in The Daily Me to challenge the beliefs you already hold. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, hypothesized that blogs may in fact be the modern Daily Me. Building on existing work in group psychology, Sustein warns that blogs acting as echo chambers could intensely polarize readers and snuff out dissent. Still, the question remains: are blogs echo chambers?
In their archly titled paper, Blogs are Echo Chambers: Blogs are Echo Chambers, Gilbert et. al. use a study of 75 face-to-face meetings which found that 18.7% of the time speakers actively agreed or disagreed with one another, and 64% of those opinionated moments were devoted to expressing agreement. They then categorized a blog as an echo chamber if more than 64% of the opinionated commentators agree with the blogger.
Their findings? In their hand-coded sample of over 1,000 comments from 33 of the world’s top blogs, agreement outnumbered disagreement by more than 3 to 1.
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Sorry, but I disagree.
Dear Gregory,
I read your post after quite a while, but I found the paper you cited very interesting. Goldman has a recent paper (The Social Epistemology of Blogging) that poses the problem of “whether the Web, or the Internet, is better or worse in epistemic terms than the conventional media, in terms of public political knowledge generated generated by the respective communication structures” (page 3 in the online version: http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/Social%20Epistemology%20of%20Blogging.pdf).
Goldman focuses on the problem of ‘filtering’ in the blogosphere: whether the political and institutional news and opinion filtering that takes place in conventional media is preferable to a market-type and invisible-hand-type of filtering that allegedly would take place in the blogosphere.
However Goldman’s interest is in an overall epistemic evaluation of blogging and I think that, besides the problem of filtering, one of the main problems about the goodness of knowledge obtained from the blogosphere is whether a blog can exploit the advantages of the Condorcet Jury Theorem when aggregating information. In other words, can we use the large number of bloggers as an indicator that the information the blog conveys is more reliable? The results from the paper you cite are more than just about psychology: the groups dynamics that the Eric Gilbert’s findings point at seem to show that independence of the bloggers (as required in many proofs of the Condorcet Theorem) does not normally hold in the blogosphere. I hope there will be more work about these issues. Thank you for your post!
Best wishes, Carlo
That’s an interesting angle, Carlo. And thanks for the link to Goldman’s paper. Observing the academic philosophy blogosphere over the years, my hunch is that the necessary independence conditions do not hold. If anything, I would conjecture that there are more confounding dependencies than people generally imagine. The interesting suggestion in Gilbert et. al.’s paper is that the conformity in opinion one tends to see appears to be a feature of blogging in general.
It is an interesting and rich subject, and we’re only at the beginning. If you continue working on this, I hope you’ll post on your progress.