after boy's serious post, a lighter, but related (?) video:
Monday, June 16, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Blogs and the Price of Democratic Anarchy
Democracy relies on a healthy debate, where reasonable individuals can disagree on the interpretation of events. Crucial for all this to happen, is information. We need to know the facts before we can agree to disagree on what to make of them.
In the township of Utopia, this is handled by a single source of completely unbiased information that reports on all the facts (Other accounts talk of several competing sources of similary unbiased information, but this distinction is unimportant for now.) The citizens of Utopia carefully look at all this information, analyze it and form their opinions on various weighty matters.
In our world however, this is far from true. Any transmission of information comes with its biases. The selection and ranking itself introduces additional biases. And on top of that, most sources of information have large sections (opinion pages in newspapers, "no-spin" zones on TV) that don't even pretend to be unbiased.
Additionally, the citizens, having other more mundane things to do, are severely time constrained, and do not have the time to learn all the facts. Thus they need a news source that prioritizes and nugget-izes the facts for them. Of course there are many depth-breadth tradeoff points here: how many facts? which facts? how much detail on each? how much opinion and how much fact? Thus we have different media outlets that do this in different ways, and people can pick and choose.
So this leads to an interesting competitive game. Each individual goes to a media outlet that is, on an average, as aligned with his/her preferences as possiblesubject to whatever laziness-to-look constraint they may have. Given the small number of media outlets and the large number of possible preferences, this alignment is not great, and some individuals may try to fix this by going to more than one. The media outlets themselves are trying to optimize to get a large share (or weighted share) of the market at a small cost (which happens indirectly, as advertising revenue depends on this share). This may either be a conscious decision, or may simply happen by evolutionary forces.
On the whole, this leads to an equilibrium, typically with a small number of big players; advertisers can only be aware of a small number of players, and the channels used by these media outlets (tv, print) are narrow and can support only a small number of players. Thus the outlets that survive are those that cater to a fairly large group of people.
Each of these groups, at the least, has access to the same sorts of facts, and can carry out a sensible debate. Across groups there is often a large gap, and each group considers the other media outlets to be a biased. However, given the low switching cost between outlets, an outlet cannot overtly be biased; and they usually go with the majority on important events. So we all agree not only on who the current president it; we also all agree that hanging chads and supreme court decisions influenced the 2000 election, and that swift boats and flip-flops influenced the 2004 election. For better or for worse, most of us don't believe that the planned scarcity of voting machines leading to 3-hour-long lines in particular neighbourhoods in Ohio, and voting machines that had bugs planted in them by partisan voting-machine-makers significantly impacted the result: a news story that was proposed by fringes of the media somehow did not catch on with the majority, and died without reaching the ears of most people. In general, almost every news story either reaches an overwhelming majority, or a small minority.
The game changes considerably when one looks at the new media. With help from Adsense, advertisers can now reach a large number of small outlets. And people who were constrained by narrow channels and geographic factors suddenly have access to a very large number of choices. Thus the prioritization and nugget-ization can be significantly more customized. News items that were unimportant for any of the major news organization can suddenly be available to a large number of people. Minority viewpoints can suddently be represented somewhere, and shared across geographic barriers. You can effectively have your personal source(s) of news and opinion, comprising of your favorite news outlets, your favorite blogs, your favorite videos, your favorite podcasts, your personalized news websites, your friends' twitters, all at your favorite time-of-the-day! It's all about you and it feels great!
This however also leads to a lot more fragmentation. Since blogs are not supposed to be all-encompassing, they need not tell the whole truth. They pick and choose what to report, emphasize some things at the cost of others. As opposed to the old media which makes some token effort to appear unbiased, the new media makes no such effort. And we the readers, pick the sources that we like. And we may not necessarily ignore or avoid the sources that present points-of-view that are contrary to our own views. But we are much more skeptical of what we read at such sources, since we known them to be a priori biased. We go to them occasionally thinking, "let's see how they can possibly defend this latest", and finding something we don't agree with only reinforces the belief of their bias.
To make things worse, there is a strong natural selection process that favors the more opinionated blogs. Those are the ones that get the most readers, and thus the most revenue. Thus evolutionary game theory tells us that even though individual bloggers may not be trying to be as divisive as possible, the surviving blogs have a strong bias.
So we end up in a situation where we do not understand each other's viewpoints any more. We come to the table with widely different set of beliefs about the world, about what happenned and when, about what someone said and how many times, about how someone responded, about why somebody did what they did. We have, at this point, lost the ability to empathize with the other. It's not a difference of opinion any more. It's I am right and you are wrong. It's inconceivable to me that any reasonable person can say what you are saying. It's, in short, a collapse of debate. Additionally, switching is not as easy as pressing a button on the TV remote. I know of blogs that support my candidate (they all link to one another) but may know nothing of those supporting the opponent.
And polarization is in general self-pertetuating. The more I disagree with a particular blog, the more likely I am to avoid reading it, or discount anything it says. I would rather talk politics only to friends that I know I can have a reasonable conversation with, and avoid having an unpleasant discussion where we disagree even on the axioms.
And more than before, things other than the issues that really matter to people's lives become centerstage. Whether one candidate's plane came under fire, or which country another candidates grandfather fought in becomes more important that the economy or the war. It almost make one wish for the time that gay marriage and immigration were replacing the real issues.
So: we end up with much more polarization. While we thought the new media was giving us more democracy, we end up with a lot less!
In the township of Utopia, this is handled by a single source of completely unbiased information that reports on all the facts (Other accounts talk of several competing sources of similary unbiased information, but this distinction is unimportant for now.) The citizens of Utopia carefully look at all this information, analyze it and form their opinions on various weighty matters.
In our world however, this is far from true. Any transmission of information comes with its biases. The selection and ranking itself introduces additional biases. And on top of that, most sources of information have large sections (opinion pages in newspapers, "no-spin" zones on TV) that don't even pretend to be unbiased.
Additionally, the citizens, having other more mundane things to do, are severely time constrained, and do not have the time to learn all the facts. Thus they need a news source that prioritizes and nugget-izes the facts for them. Of course there are many depth-breadth tradeoff points here: how many facts? which facts? how much detail on each? how much opinion and how much fact? Thus we have different media outlets that do this in different ways, and people can pick and choose.
So this leads to an interesting competitive game. Each individual goes to a media outlet that is, on an average, as aligned with his/her preferences as possiblesubject to whatever laziness-to-look constraint they may have. Given the small number of media outlets and the large number of possible preferences, this alignment is not great, and some individuals may try to fix this by going to more than one. The media outlets themselves are trying to optimize to get a large share (or weighted share) of the market at a small cost (which happens indirectly, as advertising revenue depends on this share). This may either be a conscious decision, or may simply happen by evolutionary forces.
On the whole, this leads to an equilibrium, typically with a small number of big players; advertisers can only be aware of a small number of players, and the channels used by these media outlets (tv, print) are narrow and can support only a small number of players. Thus the outlets that survive are those that cater to a fairly large group of people.
Each of these groups, at the least, has access to the same sorts of facts, and can carry out a sensible debate. Across groups there is often a large gap, and each group considers the other media outlets to be a biased. However, given the low switching cost between outlets, an outlet cannot overtly be biased; and they usually go with the majority on important events. So we all agree not only on who the current president it; we also all agree that hanging chads and supreme court decisions influenced the 2000 election, and that swift boats and flip-flops influenced the 2004 election. For better or for worse, most of us don't believe that the planned scarcity of voting machines leading to 3-hour-long lines in particular neighbourhoods in Ohio, and voting machines that had bugs planted in them by partisan voting-machine-makers significantly impacted the result: a news story that was proposed by fringes of the media somehow did not catch on with the majority, and died without reaching the ears of most people. In general, almost every news story either reaches an overwhelming majority, or a small minority.
The game changes considerably when one looks at the new media. With help from Adsense, advertisers can now reach a large number of small outlets. And people who were constrained by narrow channels and geographic factors suddenly have access to a very large number of choices. Thus the prioritization and nugget-ization can be significantly more customized. News items that were unimportant for any of the major news organization can suddenly be available to a large number of people. Minority viewpoints can suddently be represented somewhere, and shared across geographic barriers. You can effectively have your personal source(s) of news and opinion, comprising of your favorite news outlets, your favorite blogs, your favorite videos, your favorite podcasts, your personalized news websites, your friends' twitters, all at your favorite time-of-the-day! It's all about you and it feels great!
This however also leads to a lot more fragmentation. Since blogs are not supposed to be all-encompassing, they need not tell the whole truth. They pick and choose what to report, emphasize some things at the cost of others. As opposed to the old media which makes some token effort to appear unbiased, the new media makes no such effort. And we the readers, pick the sources that we like. And we may not necessarily ignore or avoid the sources that present points-of-view that are contrary to our own views. But we are much more skeptical of what we read at such sources, since we known them to be a priori biased. We go to them occasionally thinking, "let's see how they can possibly defend this latest", and finding something we don't agree with only reinforces the belief of their bias.
To make things worse, there is a strong natural selection process that favors the more opinionated blogs. Those are the ones that get the most readers, and thus the most revenue. Thus evolutionary game theory tells us that even though individual bloggers may not be trying to be as divisive as possible, the surviving blogs have a strong bias.
So we end up in a situation where we do not understand each other's viewpoints any more. We come to the table with widely different set of beliefs about the world, about what happenned and when, about what someone said and how many times, about how someone responded, about why somebody did what they did. We have, at this point, lost the ability to empathize with the other. It's not a difference of opinion any more. It's I am right and you are wrong. It's inconceivable to me that any reasonable person can say what you are saying. It's, in short, a collapse of debate. Additionally, switching is not as easy as pressing a button on the TV remote. I know of blogs that support my candidate (they all link to one another) but may know nothing of those supporting the opponent.
And polarization is in general self-pertetuating. The more I disagree with a particular blog, the more likely I am to avoid reading it, or discount anything it says. I would rather talk politics only to friends that I know I can have a reasonable conversation with, and avoid having an unpleasant discussion where we disagree even on the axioms.
And more than before, things other than the issues that really matter to people's lives become centerstage. Whether one candidate's plane came under fire, or which country another candidates grandfather fought in becomes more important that the economy or the war. It almost make one wish for the time that gay marriage and immigration were replacing the real issues.
So: we end up with much more polarization. While we thought the new media was giving us more democracy, we end up with a lot less!
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
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