Many of us Remember the feeling of bumping into a museum as a child, thrilled by the ample space and the seemingly endless possibility of finding that dark dinosaur, or species of fish, or what brought us there. No matter how many times we had visited the building, seeing the giant map of the museum with the bright red “You’re Here” sticker was a mistake. It even helped us discover new exhibits or other places we may have overlooked. The museum was a vast space, but the map was always there to help us locate, orient ourselves in relation to our surroundings, and finally navigate to a constructive place (mostly) without losing our way.
Today, we spend much of our time in an extremely large and complex environment: the Internet. However, most of us have very little idea of its extent, topology, dimensions, or which parts we have visited (and have not visited). We are not really aware of it on. As the birds of a feather flock together, we often bubble up with other people who share our political, social, and cultural experiences and beliefs. This is natural, and often valuable: the creation of shared spaces fosters a sense of belonging, mutual solidarity, support, and even protection from the “tyrannies of the majority.”
But fragmentation is increasingly the result of deliberate design: segregationists who fear a change in the status quo or those who have a personal interest in creating conflict. When we’re in a bubble (e.g., a pocket of friends talking online about a specific topic, or a “filter bubble” created by content referral systems), our perspectives may be skewed by our local contexts more immediate. And even when we are occasionally exposed to people from different bubbles, these interactions can offer only a superficial view of who they are and what they value, refracted through the prism of social media, which often reward performative behavior and attention seeking. Having our exposure to others filtered primarily through the rules of social media platforms or our own moral intuitions for too long, or not having any exposure to them, means that we run the risk of losing our intellectual humility. lectural, fostering the belief that we are at the center of the universe. and that our own ways of knowing are the only ones with merit. When this happens, anything we say or share, no matter how harmful or toxic, is considered legitimate because it is at the service of a singularly meritorious ideology. As we move forward, our social ignorance threatens to turn into social arrogance.
What shock absorbers could we use to prevent this from happening? Dear maps of you are here can help. Our research with colleagues suggests that reflective data visualizations designed to show people what social media communities are embedded in can make them more aware of the fragmentation of their online networks, and in in some cases, it encourages them to follow a more diverse set of accounts. These diverse and sustained expositions are critical to improving public discourse: although forced or poorly cured exposure to various perspectives can sometimes intensify ideological polarization, when done with reflection, they can reduce affective polarization (even unpleasant like “the other” just because we see them). as belonging to a different team).
The “social mirror” project, which we developed with Ann Yuan, Martin Saveski and Soroush Vosoughi, shows an example of a map that you are here. The first step in creating the map involved defining which “space” to describe. For museums, defining space is easy; for public speaking on the internet, it’s not always clear what you’re trying to do with a map of. Our space represented socio-political connections on Twitter, hoping to help people visualize the “echo chambers” where they are embedded, and then navigate to more politically pluralistic discussion networks on the platform. To do this, we developed a network view where nodes represented Twitter accounts, links between nodes indicated that these accounts followed one another, and colors represented political ideology (blue = left tilt; red = right tilt) . Participants representing one of the represented accounts were invited to explore the map.
Courtesy of Ann Yuan
