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?

Four months ago, I wrote about Walter Anderson’s Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be and how it perfectly described the rise of social networking even though it was published in 1992.  Essentially, Anderson argues that technology has advanced to the point that people can construct their own reality of like-minded individuals.

Rachel Winchester updates this argument with her concept of the Metanet.  She defines it as:

“The population of the internet has hit the point where we can no longer lump everything and everyone together as ‘the Internet.’ There’s the internet of things, as more and more devices come online of their own accord, and more and more sensors are added. There’s the cloud, where data is stored and processed, there’s the commerce internet, there are the walled gardens of intranets and private instances, and there’s social media, now the main way people interact with the internet. I’m starting to call these the metanet, the macronet, the micronet, and the me net.”

On a related note, I think my last paragraph of my original posting was a bit pessimistic as I asserted that social networking will lead to more groupthink and exclusionary communities.  I still think there is a danger of groupthink but the same technologies can also make it easier for people to break from groups they no longer find useful or welcome to form their own.  A key to this is how social networking technologies make it easier to raise criticisms and objections that could prevent the formation of groupthink.  Must keep an open mind on this.

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.