Birds of a Feather
The vision of being connected to everyone on the Web to get a broad perspective on life is false. The software that is necessary for sifting through the impossible volumes of information is only showing us what it thinks we want to see. But we can’t blame the software. In real life, we also filter whom we pay attention to. People tend to social network with like-minded individuals who share the same values and opinions and reciprocate communications. We tend to befriend those who are most like us. We tend to read the same newspapers, like the same TV shows and enjoy the same pastimes. This homophily may lead to increased group cohesion but it also isolates us from other groups who share different values. In other words, it fosters increasing polarization. For example, in one study on attitudes about global warming, Republicans shifted from 49 per cent who believed the planet was warming up in 2001 to 29 per cent in 2010. In contrast, Democrats increased from 60 per cent to 70 per cent who believed it was a problem over the same period.28 It was if they were living on different planets.
One might think that the Web should counter this tendency of homophily and broaden our minds to different viewpoints. Indeed, Twitter activity encourages total strangers to become connected. If your followers like or dislike what they hear, they can comment or communicate by ‘mentioning’ you in an open post. That way you can tell whether anyone is paying any attention to you. Twitter users ‘retweet’ messages and links they like. It’s like saying, ‘Hey everybody, look at what this person over here is saying,’ thereby spreading the influence from someone they follow to other users not directly connected to them. If you say something influential it can spread more rapidly across the ‘Twittersphere’ than conventional channels. This is how Twitter users were made aware of the top secret US assault on Osama Bin Laden’s complex as it was happening in May 2011: one Twitter user, Sohaib Athar a.k.a. @reallyvirtual, who lived near Bin Laden, live-tweeted the raid without realizing what was going on. He later tweeted, ‘Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it.’ Prior to the raid, Sohaib had 750 people following him. After the raid, he had over 90,000. No wonder Twitter makes surfing blogs and the Web look boring and long-winded. You don’t even have to be at a computer terminal as these social networking sites are now all accessible on mobile phones. Twitter is the crack cocaine of social networking.
Despite the ease of Twitter connectivity, it leads to homophily, with people of the same age, race, religion, education and even temperament tending to follow each other and unfollow those with different views. For example, in one study of over 102,000 Twitter users who produced a combined 129 million tweets in six months, researchers analysed their posting on measures of positive or negative content.29 Upbeat tweets were things like, ‘Nothing feels like a good shower, shave and haircut … love it’, or ‘thanks for your follow, I am following you back, great group of amazing people’. Those of a more miserable disposition posted tweets such as ‘She doesn’t deserve the tears but I cry them anyway’ or ‘I’m sick and my body decides to attack my face and make me break out!! WTF’. When the researchers analysed the social networking of the group they found that those who clustered together shared the same dispositions. This type of clustering is illustrated in Figure 10. Happy users are connected to other happy users and unhappy users are connected to other miserable sods. It was as if there was emotional contagion between Twitter users, like the mimicry of the mirror system we encountered earlier only this time the transfer was entirely virtual. Of course, this type of clustering increases polarization. An analysis of 250,000 tweets during the US congressional midterm elections in 2010 revealed that liberals and conservatives significantly retweeted partisan messages consistent with party line, but not those from the opposing camp.30
Furthermore, the promise of communication with thousands of users is not fulfilled because of one major stumbling block – our evolved human brain. When the tweets of 1.7 million users over six months were analysed, the researchers made a remarkable discovery.31 As the number of followers increase, the capacity to interact with others becomes more difficult in this ‘economy of attention’. We cannot have meaningful exchanges with unlimited numbers of other people. There simply is not enough time and effort available to respond to everyone. It turns out that within this vast ocean of social networking the optimum number at which reciprocal communication can be maintained, peaks at somewhere between 100 and 200 followers. Likewise, on Facebook, the average user has 130 friends. Does that number seem familiar? It should. It’s close to Dunbar’s again, which describes the relationship between the primate cortex and social group size. It turns out accurately to predict our social activity in the virtual world of social networking sites to be as much as in the real world.
Figure 10: Analysis of communication on Twitter reveals significant grouping (based on a study by Bollen et al., 2011. Copyright permission given).
Time for Our Self
Technology was supposed to liberate us from the mundane chores in life. It was supposed to make us happier. Twentieth-century advertisements promised a world of automaticity and instant gratification. When the computer first came along in the 1960s and then into many Western households during the 1980s and 1990s, we were told that we would have increased freedom to pursue leisure and entertainment. We were supposed to have more time for each other. The computer has certainly made many tasks easier, but paradoxically many of us spend more time alone at our computers than engaging with the people with whom we live and work. My colleague, Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism, has estimated that he answers fifty emails a day and has spent over 1,000 hours a year doing so.32 I think that my online time is much worse. I don’t get as many emails as Simon but I am online every day and cannot remember the last time I had a day offline. Even on holiday or trips, I am connected.
If I am not researching articles or preparing teaching material, then I am keeping in contact with people through social networking sites. I email, write a blog, tweet on Twitter, talk on Skype, have a LinkedIn profile and drop in and out of Facebook. I have joined Google+, the latest development in social networking. I surf the Web relentlessly. I can do this via my office computer, portable laptop, iPad or smartphone. I am all wired up. Even when I watch some important event on television, I have my social network feed running so I can keep track of what other people’s opinions are on the same broadcast. I estimate that I spend at least half of my waking day online from 7 a.m. to midnight. That’s well over 3,000 hours per year – excessive by anyone’s standards. I know that this level of Web presence is not typical and probably not healthy but, if my teenage daughters are anything to go by, many people in the West are increasingly becoming immersed in their online involvement. Some argue that excessive dependence on Web activity should be considered like any other addiction though psychiatrists are not in agreement that it really constitutes a well-defined disorder.
My addiction to the Web began in 2009 when I started my online presence and social networking at the request of the publisher of my first book. Initially, I was asked to write a blog – a website where you write stories and hope that people visit and read what you write. From the outset I thought that blogging was a self-indulgent activity but I agreed to give it a whirl to help promote my book. In spite of my initial reluctance I soon became addicted to feedback. Readers could leave comments about each posting and as an administrator of my site I could see who and how many people where visiting. It was not enough to post blogs for some unseen audience. I needed the validation from visitors that my efforts and opinions were appreciated. These were recorded as ‘hits’ – the number of times people visited my site. This feedback process is supercharged by the accelerated nature of communication on the Web. Unlike peer-reviewed scientific papers or critics’ reviews of your books that can take ages and are unpredictable, social networking sites can create instantaneous gratification from feedback. If the public responds positively to something we have written by increasing traffic or leaving kind comments, this makes us feel very good indeed. It justifies our efforts.