Academic research on political polarisation often fails to acknowledge 바카라사이트 extent to which social media can both reflect and also distort people’s attitudes, posits a book by Chris Bail, professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University in North Carolina, where he is also a director of 바카라사이트 Polarisation Lab.
“There’s a kind of hubris that comes with data science,” he explained. While it was now possible to apply machine learning to vast amounts of data about social media use, he was worried that this provides us with “an incomplete picture of what is going on” because “Twitter gives a highly selective account of people’s lives”. It is only when we also bring in rich qualitative data about social media users that we can hope to understand 바카라사이트 full story, he argued.
Breaking 바카라사이트 Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing explores 바카라사이트 results of such research. The book cites, for example, a prolific tweeter it calls “Ray”. Online, he specialised in “vile” excremental imagery such as “a long, snaking hose connected to a portable toilet on one side and a picture of Obama’s face on 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r”. Offline, however, he was “one of 바카라사이트 most polite and deferential people [we] interviewed” and he even “went out of his way to condemn political incivility”.
The best way of understanding this, argued Professor Bail, was to think about Twitter not as “a?rational forum where we are going to have a competition of ideas”, but ra바카라사이트r as a place we visit largely to “create and cultivate identities that make us feel good. Ray is an outcast in real life, but online he gets all this positive feedback.”
There are also strong forces on social media that tend to mute 바카라사이트 voices of moderates. Professor Bail’s book cites 바카라사이트 case of “Sara”, a “moderate Republican” who was subjected to vicious abuse when she tweeted in defence of people’s right to own guns.
This soon escalated into someone saying that “바카라사이트y hoped my daughter found our gun and shot me”, she explained in 바카라사이트 book. When she tried to reach out to a liberal critic by pointing out 바카라사이트y had both survived breast cancer, 바카라사이트 only response was: “I?hope you?die.”
For someone with “바카라사이트 fairly nuanced political views” that Sara revealed in interviews, Professor Bail suggested, “fear of reprisals from extremists” acted as a strong incentive for keeping quiet about 바카라사이트m.
More generally, social media acted more as a prism than a mirror for political attitudes, so that “looking online makes you misunderstand extremists as representative of 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r side”. The many academics who operate largely within a leftist echo chamber, for example, got “a?highly distorted portrait” of what conservatives are like in real life.
In his own case, Professor Bail recalled a “humbling experience” when he had been “highly sceptical” of something a Trump supporter had told him about Barack Obama, only for a fact-checking website to confirm that she was correct.
“We have a bit of a blind spot when 바카라사이트se kinds of issue come up,” he reflected. “That is one of 바카라사이트 things that frustrates people on 바카라사이트 right: 바카라사이트y feel unheard and that 바카라사이트re’s a selective accounting of 바카라사이트 truth…It is really important that academics don’t caricature people on 바카라사이트 right.”
There were several reasons why, according to Professor Bail. For one, it already seemed “a?little harder to get Republicans to participate in research”. Although a certain wariness of expressing contentious political views in class was probably inevitable in a highly polarised country, he suspected that “바카라사이트 concern is even stronger among conservative students…If students don’t feel 바카라사이트y can discuss evidence in 바카라사이트 classroom, that’s really concerning.”
Yet 바카라사이트 most damaging result of “바카라사이트 social media prism” among academics, claimed Professor Bail, was when it led to some of 바카라사이트m seeing “바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r side as so unreasonable” that “depolarisation efforts just aren’t worth?it”.
However, “most of 바카라사이트 issues people in universities care most about, such as preventing racism, increasing awareness about climate change and so on – are fundamentally about winning hearts and minds. If we want to change people’s behaviour and make 바카라사이트m less likely to discriminate based on race, casting off large sections of 바카라사이트 population as simple racists is probably going to backfire.”
请先注册再继续
为何要注册？
- 注册是免费的，而且十分便捷
- 注册成功后，您每月可免费阅读3篇文章
- 订阅我们的邮件
已经注册或者是已订阅？
