Exposure to Political Diversity Online
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EXPOSURE TO POLITICAL DIVERSITY ONLINE Sean A. Munson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Information) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Paul J. Resnick, Chair Assistant Professor Eytan Adar Assistant Professor Mark W. Newman Assistant Professor Joshua M. Pasek ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This could easily be the longest chapter of the dissertation. I have many colleagues to thank for their role in the individual dissertation studies; I do so in the footnotes for each chapter. I am indebted to scores of others for their help with my research, graduate school, and my education more generally, but I need to take this space to thank several by name. I came to Michigan after reading Paul Resnick’s chapter on Building Sociotechnical Capital. That chapter convinced me that the School of Information is a community that cares not just about deeply understanding the relationship between people, information, and technology, but that also seeks to build systems that showcase technology’s potential benefits for society. Since starting at Michigan, Paul has been steady in his support of both the importance of my research topics and of my learning, seeming to always know when to offer encouragement and when to offer critique or skepticism. Through many conversations and debates, we worked out research directions, system design choices, study designs, analyses, and how to communicate the results. I am grateful to my committee members – Eytan Adar, Mark Newman, and Josh Pasek – who graciously worked with my suddenly-aggressive schedule for completing the dissertation while still providing thoughtful, considered suggestions on how to improve this work and where to go next. These suggestions will pay dividends for years to come. Thank you, as well, to the entire community of faculty, staff, and students at the School of Information, but especially Michael Cohen, Mark Ackerman, Erin Krupka, Tom Finholt, Beth Yakel, Judy Olson, Mick McQuaid, Erik Hofer, Derek Hansen, Sue Schuon, Becky O’Brien, Ann Verhey-Henke, and Jocelyn Webber. I have also been lucky to have many wonderful collaborators and mentors outside of SI, including Sunny Consolvo, ii Margie Morris, Caroline Richardson, Ed Chi, Julie Kientz, Jenny Preece, Daniel Avrahami, and Katie Siek. Of course, my education did not begin with graduate school. This begins with my parents, Gary and Beth, who have encouraged and indulged my curiosity from the start, whether they were helping me send a battleship design to the Navy as a kindergartener or setting me up with Visual Basic and teaching me calculus so I could write a computer game. Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have many fantastic teachers, teachers who forgot to tell their students what we could not do. Melissa Ryan, Eleanor Hart. Ann Murdoch, Michael Roche, and Ellen LeBlanc did their best to introduce me to research, though I thwarted these efforts and turned these projects into engineering ones. Yevgeniya Zastavker and Marc Vilain finally got me to do research, though it was not until I worked with Derek Hansen during my first year at Michigan that I finally understood how engineering and science could really go together. Doing my undergraduate work at Olin was an amazing experience. Caitrin Lynch and Rob Martello helped me turn my disappointment about my own political blogging experiences into an academic question: a situation to study and try to improve upon, rather than to simply leave in my past. Lynn Andrea Stein and Mark Chang introduced me to the literature, and, more importantly, the community, of human computer interaction research and researchers. Without these experiences, I doubt that I would have found the path to the work that I came to Michigan to do and that is represented in this dissertation. Rod Crafts was a patient mentor and guide to the world of higher education; I credit our conversations for helping me seriously consider a career in academia. I am grateful to others working on political information access and discussion online, who have challenged me to work harder and who have been invaluable sounding boards: Travis Kriplean, Souneil Park, Jonathan Morgan, Kelly Garrett, Eric Baumer, and Nick Diakopolous. Many other colleagues have been supportive friends, critical reviewers, and thoughtful provocateurs, as necessary, in Ann Arbor, online, and at conferences and iii workshops: Jessica Hullman, Eytan Bakshy, Patrick Gage Kelley, Phil Ayoub, Daniel Zhou, Pedja Klasnja, and Erika Poole, especially. Other friends helped me escape from the world of research as necessary: thanks Matt & Emily Darragh, housemates at 406 (Greg Thorne, Aston Gonzalez, Jeremy Canfield, Shannon Curry, Allie Goldstein, Kirsten Howard, and Yariv Pierce), Morgan Mihok, Ariel Shaw, Brian Karrer, and Kim McCraw for those needed infusions of sanity. My dissertation research has been supported by the National Science Foundation under award IIS-0916099, a Yahoo! Key Technical Challenge grant, and an Intel PhD Fellowship. iv PREFACE “It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and particularly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.” JS Mill “It may make your blood boil, your mind might not be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. It is essential for democracy.” President Barack Obama The challenge of increasing individuals’ exposure to and engagement with diverse political viewpoints is not merely an academic question for me. From my junior year of high school until my junior year of college, I wrote a political blog. It attracted some readership, enough to get me credentials to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and to be gently teased on The Daily Show. Shortly after the 2004 US Presidential election, though, I woke up reflecting that, through my blog, I had communicated almost exclusively with like-minded individuals. Yes, some of my readers, and I, had become a bit more fired up and perhaps a couple of additional people voted, but the discussion on the blog came nowhere near the diverse, thoughtful discussion that I had hoped to have, and so I stopped. A desire to tackle this problem – to find ways to promote the deliberative discourse that had not materialized on my blog, or to find places where it might already v occur – motivated me to come to graduate school. This dissertation summarizes the efforts my colleagues and I have made on one small but important piece of this problem – increasing individuals’ exposure to diverse points of view – over the past five years. Like most dissertations, this one ends up being smaller than the original ambition. I hope, though, that it moves me, and our community, closer to our goals. Sean Munson 12 July 2012 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Preface v List of Figures xi List of Tables xiii CHAPTER I Introduction 1 Selective exposure theory 2 Dangers of selective exposure to political information 3 Selective exposure and the Internet 6 News aggregators 10 Non-political spaces 11 Outline of the dissertation 13 II Sidelines: An Algorithm for Increasing Diversity in Voter-curated News Aggregators 17 Diversity goals 18 Overview of the chapter 19 Data sets 20 Algorithms 22 Diversity measures 24 vii Inclusion / Exclusion 24 Alienation 24 Proportional representation 25 Digg.com evaluation 27 Blog links evaluation 27 Discussion 30 Conclusion 35 III Sidelines Experiment 36 Study design 37 Hypotheses about the Sidelines results 38 Results 39 Discussion 42 Conclusion 43 IV Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much 44 Exposure to diversity 47 Methods 48 Subject recruitment 49 Item selection 51 Experimental design 52 Results 55 Diversity preferences 55 Presentation techniques for challenge-averse readers 60 Discussion 63 Conclusion 68 V Presentation: Foresight and Hindsight Widgets 69 The design space for presenting political opinion diversity 70 viii When the information is communicated 70 What information is communicated 71 First study design 73 Classification of articles 74 The BALANCE widgets 75 Experiment design 78 Subject recruitment 79 Results: major issues with study design 80 An alternative study design 82 Observing behavior 83 Classifying articles 84 Enticement to participate 85 Proposed study design 86 VI The Prevalence of Political Discourse in Non-Political Blogs 94 Politics in non-political spaces 96 Methods 98 Data set and collection 98 Classification of posts 98 Classification of blogs 102 Results 104 Are political posts treated as taboo on non-political blogs? 108 Discussion 113 VII Summary 116 VIII What’s next? 118 Contemporary research 118 Increasing role of the Internet for political news & information 120 ix A future research agenda 121 Preferences 122 News aggregators 122 New spaces: Facebook and Twitter 126 Civic engagement, idea formation, and side effects 128 References 130 x LIST OF FIGURES II-1 Visualization of the projection of bipartite graph of blog-item links. 21 II-2 Alienation score for Sidelines and Pure Popularity algorithms on blog data set. 28 II-3. Proportional Representativeness score for Sidelines and Pure Popularity algorithms on blog data set. 29 II-4. Representation of the Generalized Sidelines algorithm. 31 III-1 Portion of the online survey asking users to read links and reply to questions. 37 IV-1 Competing hypotheses about preferences for agreeable and challenging items. 45 IV-2 Example articles and question form. 49 IV-3 Locations of Mechanical Turk workers who participated in the study. 51 IV-4. Comparison of satisfaction at different percentages of agreeable items for diversity- seeking and other (either challenge-averse or support seeking) individuals. 57 IV-5 Top: Percent agreement and satisfaction for 8 and 16 item lists.