I don't doubt that there's some validity to this-- I was at an ad agency when Readers Digest set up a display of free copies in the lobby; here was one of the 2 or 3 best-read magazines in America and the young trendies all approached it like it was the monolith in 2001, utterly alien and possibly dangerous. Clearly our politics, to name one, have a certain tendency to trap people in a cocoon of groupthink these days (cough, cough, can't imagine what sites he's talking about there), and convince them that all think the same way-- until election day shows how wrong they were.

At the same time, many of these shared experiences were extraordinarily banal-- Topo Gigio, the last episode of MASH, Princess Diana's funeral. I'm not convinced that we've lost a great deal not sharing these. I am convinced that my participation in certain niche online activities has greatly increased my knowledge within the areas that interest me most (and has often brought me into direct contact with genuine experts in those fields; and I don't mean Susan Faludi).

So, it's a tradeoff I accept, without dismissing Prof. Sunstein's genuine concerns about the nature of the evolution we're experiencing. Of course, if TPMCafe were genuinely serious about keeping itself free of the problems he describes:

the evidence shows that many people are using the Internet so as to fortify their antecedent convictions, and are basically leaping from one like-minded site to another. The evidence also shows that many bloggers generally refer to people who already agree with them -- and refer to contrary views, if at all, only to ridicule them... The basic point is that it is important for institutions to create unchosen, unanticipated encounters -- to ensure that some of the time, people find topics and ideas that they would never have placed in their Daily Me, or that they would never have chosen as part of their preferred niche.

--then it would police the rating system, and bring on posters, books for discussion, etc. who challenge the basic orthodoxy of its side, and force it to defend it vigorously, rather than foster that insularity through, at best, benign neglect.

Okay. I'm getting a better idea of what you're saying. And I LOVE the Daily Me analogy.

My knee-jerk reaction is still less about the truth of it than the context and how it will be used. It's kind of like how evolution is used to justify Social Darwinism or produces Ayn Rand. It's possible for the science to be sound and still learn the wrong lessons. Evolution also spawns cooperation, and altruism and sacrifice -- but explaining those nuances takes a long damn time.

I also find the focus misplaced. When you look at the top 20 character flaws of liberals, the things you the "Daily Me" is supposed to cause -- blind, lock-step unity, passion, stubbornness, arrogance, an unwillingness to compromise -- don't even make the list (present Memekiller excluded). Yet it's probably number 1-5 on the current GOPs very long spreadsheet.

The phenomenon is real, but I'd say the main reason I fled to the Web was to find alternatives to the Daily GOP Village. Had CNN still been capable of pointing out the obvious fact that Abramoff is a Republican, that wouldn't have been necessary.

As for insulation, I couldn't escape the Daily GOP Village if I tried. That's the point. The Internet is the portal through which I can expand the diversity of ideas I'm exposed to. Instead of the limited, selective, monolithic roundtables on Sunday morning, I get to hear from the people who don't get an invite.

Yet, I'd still say this self-selection is responsible for most of the failures of the last decade or so. Combating this tunnel-vision has been my primary focus, as one small part of a collective effort to pierce the bubble and insist on including some of the people who saw this coming a mile off from time to time, when you give us the group of usual suspects who have been wrong from the very beginning yet demonstrate no learning curve.

We can't discuss this phenomenon without discussing the alternative universe put in place by the GOP, but here, the Internet is but a tiny cog in a megaphone that includes FOX, talk radio, Drudge, most of the Op-ed pages and Sunday Morning shows, and has even infiltrated the papers of record with Judith Miller and John Solomon. It even infects the "centrists" like Joe Klein, Joe Lieberman and Tom Friedman, who, in reality, do far more for the GOP Village because they mainstream and validate the GOP megaphone by pretending this stuff is reasonable.

The Internet is simply not the phenomenon on the right it is on the left because they already have the infrastructure in place to not only shield their believers from every experiencing a contrary POV, but to pressure the MSM to adopt those views in the false hopes of luring them out of the bubble, while taking us open-minded folks for granted because we'll always listen to the other side.

So when you say "Internet" in a political context, you're really talking about the left because the Internet is where the left has had to gather the forces out of sheer necessity. Because we have no seat at the national dialogue, we've had to create one.

This isn't necessarily you're doing, but yet again, I feel like the victims are getting blamed for the Republican sins they suffer. It is those who have unified in opposition to the cult that get portrayed as blind followers. It is the targets of the manufactured outrage that can be accused of an anger that is artificial.

So, the defining flaws of the Republican Party is analyzed, as they are produced by the central medium of the liberal movement who suffers from the lack of them, while ignoring the real engine behind the Daily GOP Village -- talk radio, FOX News, Murdoch, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd.

Again, I feel like asking, where were you? You were probably working on this same thesis, but I didn't hear about it. I've been complaining about the GOP cult for years, yet no one was allowed to notice. It is only now that we've given up changing the rules and are attempting to join the game that suddenly people notice and say it's a problem, which makes it a double standard.

Then again, I'm biased. You gave my wife a decent grade when she took your class some years ago, so maybe I'm letting you off easy.

Is the Internet the cause of the "Daily Me" or is the need for a "Daily Me" a cause of the Internet?

The problem, as I see it, is the general stinkiness of the mainstream media. It's not that I don't want to have shared experiences, it's that the experiences offered for sharing aren't sufficient in either breadth or quality.

When I come here to talk about the Iraq War of healthcare, it's not because I'm looking for an echo chamber it's because people say things here that they don't say on Meet the Press.

Given that the mainstream media has filtered out a lot of interesting opinion and artistic expression a "Daily Me" is really the only alternative.

If I miss some share cultural experience, I at least get beyond some pablum.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

One problem is an absence of shared experiences: diverse nations need some social glue, and shared experiences can provide that glue, because they give people a sense that they are involved in a common enterprise.

Yes, the common experience of health care, equal quality of education, an income that a citizen can raise a family on, equal experience with the legal system, life expectancy, that should be seen as a requirement for a fellow Human in this country & in any other faux society called a nation state. We are humans before we are citizens of a country and what affect others ultimately affects us. Bird flu does not stop at borders and will not infect first someone who has health insurance to warn the country about infection.

Another problem is the risk of group polarization: If people sort themselves into groups of like-minded types, they will tend to go to extremes.

Our society uses polarization to show and keep status. Studies indicate that children of low-income parents(s)will have lower incomes in their adulthood. At age 2 average children have an average of 300 words and children in low-income families have a vocabulary of 150 words and the different continues to diverge over time.

The future is based on jobs that require flexibility and education. A business would not let a large percentage of its assets for future growth not be at peak efficiency, why is a community any different? If it only takes the hiring of one bad employee to bring down the outcomes of a work group, can society be looked at differently?

We in the United States base everything on income and wealth. In such situations the society is doomed to fracture, as there is no possibility to satisfy the expectations of the large majority of citizens when media and elites flaunt their power and economic status.
In the future all this showing of status will be camouflaged because of the inequality of most citizens. I do not think there will be a mass reaction, but it only takes a few individuals with untreated mental health problems to affect such a fragile societal structure!

What I am saying is that it seems that in our society that the flauntingly rich and old money seem to feel that their success was gained only by their efforts and that pleadings for help for societal needs is only answered by no new help for the poor and in fact they want to reduce help for those needing help. Reduce spending and starve the beast of government! They forget the government is supposed to be in concept a representative of we the people. If the people act on what they believe “those gaining money have made it because of corruption” the landscape will be chaotic.

PS, before someone says we give the most money for charity, remember most big charities set up today for the rich are trusts to make sure the money is protected at death for the family’s future use. This is counted as charitable giving!

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

For anyone interested, this seems to be an example of the Daily Me allowing people to come to conclusions about issues that aren't explored in the shared mainstream media experience.

In that post by Atrios we learn that a majority of Americans think that Bush has committed impeachable offenses (but that they don't want him impeached for them).  The mainstream media, as Atrios points out, hasn't even offered a real discussions about whether or not Bush has done anything impeachable.  People can only discuss such topics by finding "Daily Me" outlets for them.     

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I'm thinking of some examples of things that are more or less "Daily Me's". The President's Daily Brief, which, with different names, goes back to JFK as a document and to FDR as a briefing, is customized to both the interests, and expert-perceived needs, of the #1 customer.

The amount of information available, especially on the Internet, varies widely, in both individual relevance and in quality. To use a favorite phrase of Bill Gates, no one has the bandwidth to take it all in, so there has to be some sort of Me-filtering.

When I'm reading online medical journals, I'm quite aware that I don't especially track transplantation, OB/GYN, dermatology, pediatrics, or ophtalmology. In computer science, I leave data bases to someone else. While I enjoy learning about a wide range of cooking styles, I don't spend much time on baking because I can't eat most baked goods. I recognize that I don't really understand economics in depth, but I have much more of a sense of intelligence and military issues.

How am I not creating my own Daily Me?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I think that what Sunstein has here is a solution in search of a problem.

Evidence? Why not contemplate blog history? Remember when they were "Web Logs"? They functioned as internet filters, and led you to items interesting to the web log authors.

But of course I agree with you. Filters are everywhere - the CBS Evening News "selects" things that interest its staff and package it for you. A book index selects things from the text that publishers deem important.

In fact, the human also selects things from reality that have interest (say, for biological survival). We don't "sense" a lot of the noise around us - if we did we would shortly become insane. Ever had a negative hallucination? You know, you're looking for something and it turns out that you looked right at it and didn't see it.

Neoboho

Excellent post.

I would argue the centrists are most susceptible because they think they're immune.

Republicans want the disease.

It seems that everytime I google an obscure term I get a bunch of rock groups.  It reminds me of the old Tonight Show w/ Steve Allen.  Allen claimed that all a muscian has to do to name a group is think of any noun.  To prove his point, he announced: "Ladies and Gentlemen; The Four Chickens!  Allen, Louis Neye, Tom Posten and Don Knots were on stage covered with white feathers (even the guitars), jumping up and down singing "Crazy, Crazy, boodliodah."  

But here's the thing:  I just googled "the four chickens" and got nothing except recipes.   

Neoboho

Daily GOP Village -- talk radio, FOX News, Murdoch, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd.

Memekiller above.

In too many words. Let me say:too true.

The only non right wing radio comment is on little listened to/poorly distributed AirAmerica with Pacifica found only on  a handful stations.

Among newspapers we have nothing like the UK's Guardian. LeMonde once filled that role in France , perhaps still does . And there's an equivalent German paper, perhaps Die Welt, but here, nothing.I admit to paying attention to  the Times and the Newshour but the news coverage of both is consistently to the right of the centrist/moderate right Financial Times.Since Chandler was ousted the LA Times has sunk from view,as , for whatever reason, has the WAPO.

Even if we wished , we couldn't isolate ourselves here in Dailymeland

given the Right's constantly expanding control of the media with the demise,better murder, of the Fairness Doctrine and the restrictions of "corporate", read conservative, control of specific markets.

And why should it be otherwise? Or be otherwise in the future ? Implicit in standard economic theory is the belief that the individual is motivated to advance his/her own interests. To expect that the media would serve to undermine itself is like denying Smith or Hayek which I don't do. And consider that for more than a decade the Fed was controlled by someone who actually valued the lurid prose of Ayn Rand. What does that tell us about what is considered main stream ?

The danger is not that by living in the Dailyme we will become "extreme" . It's that if we don't obtain ideas and information here we will join the rest of this country in the extreme conservative positions that have become main stream only  because the other streams long ago either dried up or were forcedly channeled to the right. 

We don't live here in Meland out of self indulgence but because it is the only way to
prevent ourselves from being sucked into and,yes, corrupted by that other land.

I put alot of this down to junk science which somehow supports Sunstein's highwire balancing act. I also think it's a classic case of a solution in search of a problem and I'm sorry to say this, but it is just plain silliness. If you have institutions setting up "chance encounters" then it is no longer a "chance encounter" - it is by its nature, a "planned encounter". He complains that juries are often polarized by the press, but if any ingroup has supposedly heard both sides of a story it is a jury - so what exactly is his claim?

You're perfectly correct - whenever there is a paradigm shift there are people who think they can control it and more importantly want to control it and as you said, we don't need "heavy-handed intervention" by a fairness arbiter.

I agree with the above critique. I don't think Sunstein is really saying much.

He's pointing out that as people have greater choices and are less constricted by geographic and physical proximity, they may further self segregate, especially into virtual spaces. And? Where's the revelation? That seems rather obvious and only half the story. Yes people can specialize more in the short term to a channel or web site, but on the other hand, they can also switch inputs as easily as switching a channel, go further, see more, and in the long run are exposed to more diversity, not less.

Some fraction drawn to cult-like behavior will be freer to become more cult-like. However, most people will experience more variety, and evolve culturally more quickly than they would without the internet, cable TV, and such. The same could be said about the printing press or any other communication technology, which are all dual edged swords.

(The quality of cable news is low, almost universally. But that's due to convenience culture and prosperity, which has replaced news with entertainment, and that's a whole nother subject.)

To be blunt, his unchallenged assumptions seem somewhat ignorant regarding how the phenomenon he's describing really work, and frankly a bit paranoid.

For example, one assumption is that as people personalize spaces/portals, they'll become more "extreme" in regards to issues that matter, implicitly adults over a meaningfully period lacking other chance encounters. However, the vast majority of personalized spaces/portals are entertainment related for young people, particularly teens, superficial as favorite band, cat/dog affinity.

Another implicit mistake assumes cliques are relatively durable and impermeable, into adulthood which would radicalize the culture. Not in my experience and observations on a pretty wide swath of people.

A personal anecdote: as a teenager on the cusp of the PComputer era I was a social butterfly and explored many cliques, from computer nerd, to D&D geek, academic, artist, jock, clubber, goth, mod, punk, swing kid, among others. In my adulthood I'm in software, artistic, a science buff, a political junkie, outdoors enthusiast, traveler, and Jazz and DJ music fan. Just recently I took a dance class and learned a new sport. SO, I'm something of the renaissance guy, for whatever that's worth. And I'm not alone, I think this is another Renaissance era.

HOWEVER, in my experience some people are generalists and some specialists, in varying degrees, and in different areas of life. And that different people have varying capacities for either or both. While it's tempting to judge relative merits, both are actually niches, with their own merits, breadth and depth. I never memorized every swing band of the twentieth century, but appreciate those who have. I can't run a marathon on a whim, but appreciate those who can. Etc.

I don't see the internet fundamentally changing the underlying social dynamics. But I do see a lot of hand-wringing, especially from people who came late to internet technology.

Most people need human interaction and chance encounters, more or less, depending on personality. There will always be cafes, town halls, and spiritual places. Some people like predictability and specialization more, and there will always be book worms, geeks, and specialists. Some people like novelty more, and the world will always need generalists and "glue."

As adults go into the world for employment and socialization, they find what works best for them, finding niches that fit. As they become older they tend to look further, and seek out greater truths, and many will be drawn to politics, rigorous debate, and so on. And on the other hand, some people will always be hicks.

And again, I really don't see the internet, cable TV, and so on, fundamentally changing that equation, unless it's marginally for the better and towards diversification of experience. The most extreme cultures are those which coercively prohibit or limit curiosity, not those which allow curiosity and specialization or generalization as one chooses.

Yes people can specialize more in the short term to a channel or web site, but on the other hand, they can also switch specialization as easily as switching a channel, and in the long run are exposed to more diversity, not less.

It's certainly important to discuss the impacts of what you call the "Daily Me" and the possibility of polarization that it can create.

At the same time, the discussion should also consider the historical context of the rise of mass culture in the 20th Century with radio, TV and increasing media concentration that can and,I think, did lead to the opposite problem -- stifling conformism.

Even now, this "Daily Me" phenomenon occurs within the context of a national mass culture instead of in the context of a local community.

If you were to go back in American history a hundred years, for instance, you would have found that nearly every community in the country had its own newspaper catering to its own narrow parochial interests. (In 1900, in Kansas, there were literally hundreds of newspapers in the state, nearly one for every two over 500 population)

The only national media to create commonality was syndicated wire services like the Associated Press. The common experience of education also had that effect, although it was not as universal as today.

So in fact, we have much larger and more overbearing institutions for creating commonality on the national level then we did over 100 years ago while at the same time having much more powerful means of separating ourselves from people different from ourselves with the Internet just being the latest. Let's not forget the flight to the suburbs that separated wealthy, middle class and poor in so many cities, not to mention white from black.

Meanwhile, the institutions in the middle, at the city and state level, that sewed together local communities have, IMO, been supplanted by nationalized institutions, making the ties at those levels weaker. And that's a problem because that's where people really can meet face to face and form real, rather than abstract, connections.

I am not convinced that the internet is a cause of societal insularity. The tendency of Americans to isolate themselves in clone-like spheres was noted before widespread use of the net. It should come as no surprise that the net's virtual communities would reflect present-day trends.

It is illogical to assume that a temporal correlation is proof of causation.

Does contemporaneous media production:

1. affect society
2. reflect society
3. combine synergistically with society

The cause of insularity would be better attributed to the factors predating internet omnipresence. I sense more cause from the two-party stranglehold on politics in America, and a pandemic incapacity to coneptualise multi-dimensionally, than I do from the net. People find delusive kinship within the false modeling of a BiPolar Polity.

The sound bites; the grayscaling; the ends-testing; the devotion to black and white; the appeals to either being with us or against us; the intentional intensification of polarisation; are the causes of this. Do not demonise the net for the ploys of putrescent partisan politicians exploiting a citizenry trapped within their own prison of linear excogitation.

Exactly. Succinctly put.

Another way of looking at evolution, including cultural, is entropy in a given environment. It's exceedingly difficult to unstir the tea and milk or repartition culture.

I think much of the alarm is due simply to liberal intellectuals in ivory towers being able to directly observe microcultures for the first time, through the lens of the internet and cable. Simultaneously reactionaries are observing liberal culture through the same means, and terrified as well. Sure, reactionaries use the internet too, but that doesn't mean the internet is inherently reactionary. Quite the opposite.

Note here the remark of Judge Learned Hand during World War II: "The spirit of liberty is that spirit which is not too sure that it is right.

To which he presumably added "but I could be wrong about that."

Kozmik once said, during what some variously termed World War III, IV, or no war at all:

"A tautology is a tautology, until deconstructed."

Thinking said:

Yes, the common experience of health care, equal quality of education, an income that a citizen can raise a family on, equal experience with the legal system, life expectancy, that should be seen as a requirement for a fellow Human in this country & in any other faux society called a nation state.

Well said, and I couldn't agree more. While I personally find the whole "Daily Me" thing slightly off-putting (in its manifestations all over our society, not merely blogs), I recognize that it is only a symptom, not the problem. And frankly, I would not find "Daily Me-ism" off-putting at all if we had all (or even some) of those things Thinking mentioned.

I don't disagree that the most useful semantic web applications are not in general Web use where there is gaming of search engines, but in more domain-specific areas such as medicine and intelligence.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

My last experience playing around with archival web software is the open source Greenstone, produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato.

I gave it a run at a couple of small personal archives that were coded in XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1, after every page had been tested clean, running them through the W3C's validators. It choked on the compilation, and required extensive manual copying of the files.

Another one I tried using for a while is JLibrary, with unsatisfactory results for my purposes. I see that both have updated their codebases though, so I may give them another crack.

Blogs have a valid place and a significant role on the web, but I was very grateful when Goggle finally adjusted their algorithms in reaction to the blog roll search jacking. The decreasing signal to noise ratio was frustrating. Even though there were loud lamentations, excessive garment rending, and shrieks of injustice arising from within the blogosphere when it happened, it was a proper action on the part of Google. The Blog-roll was ingenuous, but was still a feedback loop hack which provided far too much web search placement juju.

Time to bring Lessig into this discussion.

Placing any controls on the free flow of information is antithetical to a free society.

Anything else smells of fascism.

I used the search term "Umberto Eco internet" and Coppock's interview was at the top of the page. Just for fun, I tried "eco internet" and got a lot of hits for his "From Internet to Gutenberg" essay, but no Coppock on the first results page. Why? I have no idea. Maybe the search terms embedded in the web page.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if Eco felt the same way today, but you may be correct. He's a medievalist by training, and new ideas come hard (I'm joking, of course).

BTW, you can read the Gutenberg essay (lecture) online at this URL . That's a PDF download. The HTML version is here. The Columbia lecture was given a year or so after the interview, so perhaps you can extrapolate a bit to see if you can find some changing attitudes in his views on the internet. I think in the lecture he's concerned with the needs that users have to develope new competencies to filter out the bad (mad) on the net. To quote Suzanne Trimel:

Use of the Internet will require what Eco called "a new form of critical competence, an as-yet-unknown art of selection and decimation of information." Internet users today may be unable to discriminate between "a reliable source and a mad one," he said. "We need a new kind of educational training, a new wisdom" to cope with the deluge of information.

I've loved Eco's works and ideas since I saw "Bill Moyers in Florence" on TV years ago. Moyers was interviewing individuals among the swarms of Art Historians who invaded Florence every year, who were slathering over wonderful magic of the Italian renaissance. But then he interviewed Eco, who responded "Nonesense" (about the magic) "the only thing invented during the Renaissance was capitalism!"

Neoboho