The Pew Internet and American Life project released their findings on young people’s use of social media yesterday. Apparently young people are less likely to use Twitter than adults aged 25-40 (although teenage girls are an exception). They are also less likely to blog. I don’t think that this survey data indicates that young people aren’t engaged in meaningful social life online or elsewhere – youth do lots of socializing online. This finding should remind us that participating in social media is not a unified experience. The relationships that committed Twitterers of a certain age construct (your author included) may be more representative of our age and demographic than indicative of social media itself.
No, what I’m thinking about is along the lines of what Christian Sandvig is working on: these applications are now becoming infrastructures for participation. To understand them, we need to know more about how they are built, how they work, and who controls them. Yes, we want to make things together, and we want to make relationships with people. It’s easier to do this using applications like Facebook Twitter, and YouTube. But this also means creating a relationship with the platform itself. The algorithms to which we’ve delegated the work of connecting and communicating also have agency. We don’t know much about them, in the main. Sometimes, we get a small view into the algorithms of certain systems – this week, I learned more about the School of Everything and how its search and matching
The question of social media use and agency is not just a question of knowing or being able to understand the design process. If different generations or social groups want to relate to each other in different ways, then there’s social interest in understanding how different infrastructures shape and are shaped by those relationships.
I feel that sometimes, the social media world that I’m part of acts like an echo chamber, with the kinds of relationships that “people like me” form getting reproduced by our practices – and perhaps even by our media infrastructures. We start thinking that social media works a certain way because that’s the way it works for us. I think it’s critical that research understand both ends of this process – the way systems are designed, and the potentially very different kinds of things that designs make possible, among different kinds of people. Otherwise we’ll all simply be shouting into our own social media echo chambers.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by postdocal: the social media echo chamber: how habit and algorithm combine to keep us thinking we’re the center of the universe http://bit.ly/cgH4rG…
Really interesting post. Some assorted reflections below:
The echo chamber potential of social media systems – particularly when both algorithms, and accidents of practice (.e.g. I miss the ‘working hours’ twitter feed from other countries because I’m not up and watching at that time) are actively filtering the content we consume – is definitely something we need to understand more.
I certainly find the shift from blog-reading via RSS, with a stock of blog posts, to keeping updated via Twitter, where there is far more a flow of content, changes the extent to which I’m exposed to homogenous, or differentiated materials.
The relative inaccessibility of cases other than our own in the social media space (at least, the inaccessibility of the experience of being at the heart of some other social media ‘echo chamber’ or environment) is in many ways surprising.
In both research terms, and in everyday practice as individuals engaged in social media mediated information environments, it’s interesting to ask whether the ‘solutions’ to an echo chamber, are in better algorithms (or the choice of algorithm), or in developing our own critical practice at seeking out and adding differentiated voices to our own information environments…
[…] Politicians have failed us: that seems to be the consensus after last week’s Digital Economy Bill fiasco. So now what? The social media sphere is still buzzing, and the Open Rights Group has experienced a surge in membership. Their web forums are beginning to identify opportunities for local campaigns. There is increasing acknowlegement that digital rights issues are fundamental to democracy, and that the interests of rightsholders whose business models depend on exclusion of access should not trump the communication rights of innocent individuals. Yet much remains to be done to capitalize on these opportunities to galvanize digital democracy. The UK is the site of much innovation in democratic social media from mysociety’s TheyWorkForYou which connects Hansard data to voters by location, to more mundane (but essential) projects like CTC’s FillThatHole which allows you to report dangerous potholes. But there’s still a risk that all of this innovation is contributing to an echo chamber. […]
[…] Already, social pressure and the habits of millions of internet users conspire to create ‘echo chambers’ online. What remains is a shared imaginary of openness, of a resource to be governed by its users. […]
[…] Politicians have failed us: that seems to be the consensus after last week’s Digital Economy Bill fiasco. So now what? The social media sphere is still buzzing, and the Open Rights Group has experienced a surge in membership. Their web forums are beginning to identify opportunities for local campaigns. There is increasing acknowlegement that digital rights issues are fundamental to democracy, and that the interests of rightsholders whose business models depend on exclusion of access should not trump the communication rights of innocent individuals. Yet much remains to be done to capitalize on these opportunities to galvanize digital democracy. The UK is the site of much innovation in democratic social media from mysociety’s TheyWorkForYou which connects Hansard data to voters by location, to more mundane (but essential) projects like CTC’s FillThatHole which allows you to report dangerous potholes. But there’s still a risk that all of this innovation is contributing to an echo chamber. […]