We know globalization is happening. And we know we interact with people of many different origins, because there are more people moving throughout the world today, said Ethan Zuckerman, winner of the 2014 Zócalo Book Prize for Rewire: Becoming Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. But despite the fact that “we’re at a moment where atoms are quite mobile, and people are quite mobile, I’m going to argue that bits are surprisingly immobile,” said Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. After accepting his award in front of a large crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue, Zuckerman explained why the Internet has made our understanding of the world more narrow rather than more rich and global—and how we might be able to change that.

Zuckerman used two stories to illustrate how much the media dictates Americans’ understanding of the rest of the world. The first was of Hugo Barra, a technology industry veteran and Google executive who left the company last year to work at Xiaomi, a company that “likes to think of itself as the Apple of China.” Americans were bewildered by the news; the only plausible explanation, according to the U.S. media, was a love triangle. Barra’s ex-girlfriend had begun dating Google co-founder Sergey Brin, so Barra had not choice but to move to China.

The real reason was less salacious: Barra explained that going to China is the smartest thing a technology executive can do today. There are 600 million Chinese Internet users who have disposable income for the first time. And China, said Zuckerman, is the “Galapagos Islands” of the Internet—it developed in isolation. As a result, it hosts tools and businesses that are very different from those of the rest of the world. But Americans have remained largely oblivious to the massive changes and innovations that have taken place in China’s technology sector.

Zuckerman saw a similar obliviousness in 2000, when he was commuting between the U.S. and Accra, Ghana, for the technology nonprofit he ran. That year, Ghana’s presidential election was monumental: free, fair, and won by an opposition leader, who took control from the political party that had run the country for decades. But Zuckerman could find virtually no coverage of the election in U.S. media; a 263-word article was buried on page 12 of The New York Times. “How often does this happen?” Zuckerman asked. “What are we actually getting from the rest of the world?” In trying to answer those questions, he discovered that “we’ve been getting less international news since the end of the Vietnam War.” In the 1970s, 35 percent of evening news was international; now it’s 12 percent. International reporting in high-quality U.S. newspapers has declined by 25 percent in the past 40 years—despite the fact that technology has made international reporting vastly easier.

And although we have access online to any international newspaper or website, we still choose largely domestic news sources. Ninety-four percent of the page views we give to news sites are U.S.-based sites, said Zuckerman—and it’s not just an example of American parochialism. Europeans are even worse.

“We’re not going to solve the issue of a global world by reading the newspaper,” said Zuckerman. The tools at our disposal are part of the problem: “Search puts the paradigm on us,” he said. When we do a Google search, the algorithm is trying to give us exactly what we want to find—and that’s not very good for us. “We’re not good at making choices as civic actors,” said Zuckerman. “We’re not very good at telling ourselves what we need to know about the world.”

Facebook compounds the problem by offering us news and information via our closest friends. Sure it’s helpful in choosing a restaurant—you value your friend’s opinion on a great meal more than a stranger’s—but ultimately, your view of the world is being constrained by what your friends know about the universe.

And our friends are a lot like we are, said Zuckerman, because humans instinctually flock to those like us in what sociologists call “homophily.” We’re wired to try to figure out who our tribe is, said Zuckerman—studies have shown that even in university computer labs, if you have long hair, you’re more likely to choose a seat next to someone with long hair.

Through social media, “we get information from people who look a whole lot like us and have interests that are like our interests,” said Zuckerman. We find out things about the things we care about—reinforcing our view that those are the right things to care about. It places us into echo chambers that aren’t just political but cut across all subjects and demographics.

This can’t be our main way of looking at the world, said Zuckerman: “We can’t solve the complex problems facing us by just talking to people who are like us.” You can’t fight climate change by convincing liberal American vegetarians to go vegan; you have to have difficult conversations with people in India and China. People in these countries want a high standard of living—and we have to talk about finding a way for them to live up to their aspirations without compounding the massive environmental problems we’ve already created. The same goes for combating terrorism and diseases like SARS, said Zuckerman.

“I care about this problem because I think homophily makes us stupid,” said Zuckerman. The Internet has given us the ability to look at problems from different perspectives—why not try to use it that way?

For 10 years, Zuckerman’s tried to combat homophily through Global Voices, a website that translates blogs from around the world into English. Nonetheless, few people read the site. It’s not that there’s a shortage of great content from around the world, said Zuckerman: “It’s a demand problem.” Zuckerman wears a Fitbit that counts the number of steps he takes each day and lets him know when he hasn’t exercised enough; he wants, he said, a “Fitbit for the mind” that tells us what we read, what we listen to, and whom we’re hearing from. He wants us to become more conscious of our technological behaviors—for example, the diversity of the people we follow on Twitter. And he’s looking for ways to bring more serendipity into our online lives.

“Technology’s not inevitable,” said Zuckerman. If we don’t like how the Internet does and doesn’t connect us, we can build something very different. “We need to think about how to build a Web that listens, and how to build a Web that makes us better at listening to each other,” he said.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked Zuckerman what steps he takes on a daily basis to make sure he gets more balanced views of the world.

A lot of this is systemic, said Zuckerman—changing Facebook and The New York Times would go a long way. But when it comes to individual behavior, it’s about making small changes. The worst thing you can do, he said, is try to read about the entire world, and represent the world fairly in your media consumption, in a single day. Instead, spend a week keeping a media diary—find out where you’re getting information from, and discover your bad habits. Then, pick one country, and go deep in your knowledge. And, follow your passions—if you’re interested in music, try listening to music from other places.

How, asked another audience member, do we get people to seek out things they don’t already want?

“We can work toward engineering serendipity,” said Zuckerman. We shouldn’t rely on people wanting to experience different people and places because it’ll make them better—but because serendipity “is one of the most amazing things” that can happen to a person. And we can work toward engineering it. The first step, said Zuckerman, is forcing yourself into an unexpected encounter. You won’t get that by walking to work on the same street every day. You have to take different routes—force yourself out of your rut and off your usual path.

The post You, Too, Can Escape From Your Online Echo Chamber appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Rewire, Ethan Zuckerman challenges our assumption that the Internet will inevitably create a more connected world. Since the Victorian era, utopians have believed that technology has the power to erase prejudice, enhance cooperation, and create a new global social order. Despite the ubiquity and power of the Internet, none of this has come to pass. Zuckerman shows how the Internet reinforces the human tendency to interact with those with whom we have the most in common. At the same time, he offers optimism about the many ways in which technology can do a better job of bringing people of diverse backgrounds and interests together.

He knows this subject firsthand. Zuckerman is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and co-founder of Global Voices, an international community of bloggers working to make online political dialogues more globally inclusive.

As the winner of the Zócalo Book Prize, Zuckerman will receive $5,000—and on Friday, May 9, he’ll deliver a lecture: “Can the Internet Be Rewired to Build a Smaller, More Cooperative World?” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Please see more details on the award ceremony, sponsored by the California Community Foundation, here.

We recently got in touch with Zuckerman to ask him some questions about his work:

Q. What’s the biggest force against our becoming citizens of the universe—and connecting with people around the globe—in contemporary life? 

A. Unfortunately, it’s a 25-cent, sociological word: “homophily,” which explains the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. If you are a liberal from New England and you go to a place where there are people from all sorts of backgrounds, you are naturally going to find the liberals from New England. There are piles of sociological literature that show that people will walk into a computer lab at a college and gravitate toward people they have something in common with. Homophily combines with the Internet and has made it really, really easy to find our tribes online and to get as much information as we can from our tribes. The temptation is to blame the Internet—Facebook is isolating all of us, it’s separating us into echo chambers. Some of this is true, but it’s the combination of this very basic tendency for us to sort ourselves by race, ethnicity, gender, political beliefs, and socioeconomic status, combined with the incredible amount of choice we have online.

Q. You challenge cyberutopianism but don’t dismiss it out of hand. How would you respond to criticism that your arguments are too moderate to effect real change? 

A. The cheesy way to write a trade book is to take a sharp stab in one direction and assume someone else is going to write something counterbalancing you. It’s easier to write a book saying the Internet is stupid or the Internet is giving us superpowers than it is to write a book that says the Internet is complicated. I think there’s a case to be made that this is the best tool for international understanding. There’s also a case to be made that we’re really far from using the Internet in that way. The problem is that makes it a whole lot harder to sum up the argument.

Q. Can you recommend three simple steps anyone can follow to transform oneself into what you call a “bridge figure”—a person who connects cultures?

A. 1. Pay attention to what you’re reading and what you’re listening to. I ask my students to keep a media diary—to spend a week keeping track of what you listen to, what you read, and what you watch. Getting a sense of how you’re spending your time with media gives you a sense of your patterns. I, for instance, have a bad Reddit habit. And as much as I think of myself as cosmopolitan, during football season I’m spending time on Green Bay Packer stuff. I can look at my media diary and say, “Do I want to do this or read something else?”

2. When people start looking for international news or news from other places, they dive into something like Global Voices and read everything on the site, and it’s really, really hard. When you start learning about a different world, you have to pick up a certain amount of background. My friend, [technology writer] Clay Shirky, has a good suggestion: pick one part of the world you want to know more about.

3. Find a way into other parts of the world through what you already know and what you care about. I’m a music guy. I spend a lot of time looking for music from around the world. There are countries where all I really know is what the music there sounds like. But even that is enough context that I’m more receptive to what’s going on in those countries—I’m more open to them.

Q. How can folks who want to build a more connected society use the upcoming World Cup to our advantage?

A. I think the World Cup is a great time to look at this. For starters, the World Cup is a terrific way to take a look at Brazil and to look at Brazil’s mixed feelings about the Cup. People who are passionate soccer fans and passionate about Brazil’s rise are also deeply skeptical about whether they should be spending this much money on a soccer stadium.

It’s also a wonderful time to dive into each of the nations who end up competing: their challenges, their futures, their histories. During the 2010 World Cup, Global Voices set up watching parties online for people from each country who were involved with the matches. We expected them to be full of taunting and a little stressful. Instead, it was wonderful. It was so polite. It started with each side complimenting the other and asking who on the other team was famous, who was well-known, who was loved as a player. We expected a bar fight, and it turned into a wonderful conversation between groups. I see the World Cup and the Olympics as wonderful excuses to explore our curiosity and find out about other parts of the world.

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With this in mind, we are proud to honor the author of the book published last year that most enhances our understanding of community and connectedness with the Fourth Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize.

Because we take a broad view of social cohesion, we considered U.S.-published books exploring civility, poverty, love in the time of technology, and friendship since the ancient Greeks. We examined 100 entries from sociologists, biologists, lawyers, psychologists, an architect, and a gardener.

The three finalists chosen by our seven-judge panel are terrific storytellers and thinkers who view community and connection through entirely different lenses.

On Thursday, April 3 we’ll announce the winning author, who will receive $5,000 and deliver a lecture at our book prize ceremony:

Fourth Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Award Ceremony, sponsored by the California Community Foundation 

Friday, May 9, 2014, 7:30 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, California

Below, in alphabetical order by author, are introductions to our top three contenders:

Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by Abigail Carroll 

More than ever before in America, food is not just mere nourishment. We’ve been coming together around meals since the Industrial Revolution but why, asks cultural historian Carroll, do we gather for the family dinner, and why is it important? How does the way the nation eats define who we are today—and what has our food said about us since the colonial era? The meals we eat, writes Carroll, speak “to the deep, often tacit relationships we have with our families, our sustenance, our society, and ourselves.”

Carroll “argues persuasively that the adage ‘you are what you eat’ needs to be bolstered by the understanding that ‘we are how we eat’” and “looks ahead to our eating habits’ role in shaping our cultural bonds,” said one of our judges. Another applauded her “readable tour of sliced bread and Thanksgiving gluttony” for “helping to explain how we became the way we are.”

The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British-born historian Winchester follows in the footsteps of the great men who transformed the disparate geographies and people of the U.S. into a country in order to figure out how American unity was created and sustained. From the explorers Lewis and Clark to the engineers who created the backbone of the Internet, American pioneers created the various ties that bind us together. These ties, write Winchester, “have proved crucial both in maintaining the union and in preventing, or at least lessening the likelihood, of its fracturing and spinning into a thousand separate parts.”

“Winchester manages,” said one of our judges, “to make the creation of infrastructure noble and even exciting, with vivid vignettes of different famous (and oddball) characters from throughout American history who in one way or another helped create the fibers that connect us.” Added another judge, “The tales he weaves were more engaging than most contemporary fiction.”

Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman

We shouldn’t assume that the Internet will make the world a smaller place, writes media scholar and Internet activist Zuckerman. The Internet, as we use it today, he argues, is more likely to reinforce our biases than to challenge them, and to connect us more closely to people like us than to strangers. Zuckerman shares case studies and anecdotes of people who have succeeded in bridging cultures and continents as he calls for us to “take control of our technologies and use them to build the world we want rather than the world we fear.”

Rewire, said one of our judges, is “a book for our times” and a “smart, historically nuanced account of the impact of social media” on our world. Said another judge, “It’s rare to read the thoughts of someone who is as exuberant about face-to-face conversation as he is about the algorithms that allow us to interact instantly across continents.”

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