Bill's Notebook

As Walter Anderson predicted close to 20 years ago, the ability to create personal realities has led to the increasing rise of online hate sites.  Is there an app that PREVENTS groupthink and group polarization?

Back when the Internet was still an exclusive hobbyist network and Bill Clinton was running his first Presidential campaign, Walter Anderson was writing about how the technologies of that time allowed people to construct their own views of reality.  Back in the days of one cable news network, few people owned a cellphone, and 1200-baud modems, his ideas seemed fantastic to me but I could see it happening once the necessary technology infrastructure was in place.

Now we have the Internet and it is quite easy to construct your own reality.  It’s called group polarization and, according to Joshua-Michéle Ross, it is one of the paradoxes of the Internet age.  As the Internet offers us more opportunities to connect with more people, we tend to connect with people like us.  This leads to the hardening of opinions and a quicker propensity to group think.

This is why I worry about the dark side of social networking as informal learning gurus and collaboration vendors try to push their technological solutions.  I have yet to see a social networking technology that can counter groupthink or group polarization.