Friday, March 06, 2009

Narrow casting and democracy

One of the interesting evolutions in modern media is the personalized news page. I can build a page full of RSS feeds of bloomberg markets news, WSJ editorials, tech news from alleyinsider, and world news from the BBC, all in one place. I can tune and tweak my information stream to contain nearly exactly what I want, and nothing more.

What's the problem? Confirmation bias. People like to read news and perspectives that confirm their view of the world. Rush Limbaugh fans get agitated listening to left-leaning radio and vice versa. And news media is increasingly inclined to inject perspective rather than strive for objective neutrality. Fox news springs to mind as an example.

Since civic life in a democracy depends on a certain amount of common ground, this narrowcasting is dangerous. We can now use personalization to effectively tune-out perspectives with which we disagree. Indeed, we may create such isolated media bubbles for ourselves that we might not even be aware of the areas of disagreement. Such an information consumption distortion is going to harm political discourse, because people won't be able to see two side of the issues anymore. They may not even agree what the issues are in the first place.

Therefore I think it's important that at least some part of our information diet is determined not through personalization or algorithmic prediction or whatever. I think there's still a strong place for the Tom Brokaw's of the world to pick the major issues of the day, and give a balanced perspective on those issues. And everyone's info diet should at least include that feed.

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