ECHO CHAMBERS AND HOLOGRAMS
Such behavior leads to accidental and probably largely unconscious segregation. We may not realize that if all of us choose to hang out with friends like us, we end up forming entirely separate islands of similar people.
This feeds into the intensification of apparently bizarre preferences and/or extreme political views. One obvious downside of sticking to our own is we don’t get exposed to other points of view. As a result, differing opinions can persist, even on points of fact such as whether vaccines cause autism or where Barack Obama was born, and even more obviously on matters of taste. We earlier observed that people might rationally choose to suppress their own opinions and join the herd, but of course not being exposed to any opinions outside the herd only makes things worse. We end up with multiple closed groups with contrasting opinions and very little capacity for communicating respectfully with each other. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and a member of the Obama administration, describes these as “echo chambers,” where like-minded people whip themselves into a frenzy by listening only to each other.59One result of this is extreme polarization on what should be more or less objective facts; for example, 41 percent of Americans believe human activity causes global warming, but the same number either say warming is due to a natural cycle (21 percent) or say there is no warming at all (20 percent). According to the Pew Research Center,60 public opinion about global warming is deeply segmented along political lines: “Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say there is solid evidence that temperatures are rising (by a margin of 81% to 58%), and that human activity is the root cause (by 54% to 24%).” That does not mean Democrats are necessarily more pro-science. The scientific consensus, for example, is that GMO foods are not harmful to health, but a strong majority of Democrats think they are and are in favor of labeling them.61
Another result of constantly talking to the same people is that the members of a group tend to have shared opinions on most issues.
Eclectic political positions become increasingly untenable in the face of a resolute herd, even one that is resolutely wrong. In fact, Democrats and Republicans do not even speak the same language anymore.62 Matthew Gentkzow and Jesse Shapiro, two economists who are leading scholars of the media, write about members of the US House of Representatives: “Democrats talk about ‘estate taxes,’ ‘undocumented workers’ and ‘tax breaks for the wealthy,’ while Republicans refer to ‘death taxes,’ ‘illegal aliens,’ and ‘tax reform.’ The 2010 Affordable Care Act was ‘comprehensive health reform’ to Democrats and a ‘Washington takeover of health care’ to Republicans.” It is now possible to predict the political affiliation of a congressman simply by listening to the words they use. Unsurprisingly, partisanship (defined as the ease with which an observer can infer a congressperson’s party from a single sentence) has exploded in recent decades. Between 1873 to the early 1990s, it did not change, increasing from 54 percent to just 55 percent during this period. But it increased sharply after 1990; by the 110th session of Congress (2007–2009) it was 83 percent.This convergence of opinions and vocabulary is precisely why access to Facebook data was so useful to Cambridge Analytica and to political campaigns in the UK and the US. Since most Massachusetts Democrats, for example, have more or less the same views across a wide range of questions and use the same words, it takes just some snippets of our opinions to predict our politics, how we should be targeted, and what types of stories we are likely to like or dislike. And, of course, once real people embrace this cardboard cutout predictability, it becomes that much easier to invent characters, create fake profiles, and inject them into an online conversation.63
This insularity also creates an opportunity for skilled political entrepreneurs to present themselves very differently to very different people.
During the run-up to the 2014 election for prime minister that he won in a landslide, Narendra Modi in India managed to be at many rallies at the same time by using full-scale, three-dimensional holograms that many voters took to be real. He also managed to be at more than one place in ideological terms. To the generation of globally connected ambitious young urban Indians, he was the embodiment of political modernization (emphasizing innovation, venture capital, and a slick pro-business attitude, and so on); the new entrants into the expanding middle class saw him as the one most likely to uphold their vision of nationalism rooted in Hindu tradition; for the economically threatened upper castes, he was the rampart against the (largely imagined) growing influence of Muslims and lower castes. If members of these groups had met together and each had been asked to describe “their” Modi, their answers would probably have been largely unrecognizable to the others. But the networks in which these three groups operated were sufficiently separate that there was no need for internal consistency.More on the topic ECHO CHAMBERS AND HOLOGRAMS:
- Banerjee Abhijit V., Duflo Esther. Good Economics for Hard Times. PublicAffairs,2019. — 403 p., 2019