Ethan Zuckerman: 'Time to break the cyber-utopian myth' (2010)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jykGYsrm1es
About: "Who do you read and associate with online? Ethan Zuckerman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Zuckerman argues that cultural and linguistic barriers stand in the way of our using the internet to tackle global issues" (Hanman, N., Reed, J., Domokos, J., & Bennett, C., 2010). Transcript: "...early on in the Internet people often came online because they were looking for a community around a very specific interest. So if you were interested in something esoteric you might come online find people around the world, or at least whoever was online at that point uh make friendships that were somewhat non-geographic. Now with the rise of things like Facebook other social networks we see a lot of replication of offline social networks online. If you think about what happens on Facebook - the first thing Facebook asks you to do is find who you went to high school with and who you went to college with so essentially if they were already your friends by virtue of the fact that you grew up in the same neighbourhood they're now still your friends online. And then we go a step further services like Facebook but also to a certain extent Twitter um in a slightly different way uh Community filters like Reddit and Digg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg rely on a flock of people to tell you what's interesting and what's popular and if your flock is sufficiently diverse that's great um but if you happen to go to uh A Flock that has a lot of people who view the world the same way you may miss some very valuable pieces of information. There's a very old and very well documented trend in sociology called homophily a lot of this literature starts in the 1950s uh where sociologists started looking at how people formed friendships and it turns out that even in a friendship of even in a community of people of of different races different genders so on and so forth you'll see biases in friendship formation you'll see pervasive biases they tend to be racial gender-based religious so on and so forth it's a much older issue than the 1950s you know it's it's uh 'birds of a feather flock together' which literally you can find references to in Aristotle it seems to be a very basic human tendency." https://www.youtube.com/embed/jykGYsrm1es?start=38&end=112 Point: https://www.youtube.com/embed/jykGYsrm1es?start=112&end=158 Homophily is the sociological principle that individuals associate and bond with similar others, often summarized as "birds of a feather flock together". Bibliography: Hanman, N., Reed, J., Domokos, J., & Bennett, C. (2010, July 26). "Time to break the cyber-utopian myth." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2010/jul/26/cyber-utopian-myth-internet-ethan-zuckerman
