Ethan Zuckerman is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.  Incredibly and embarrassingly, I never managed to link with the Berkman Center during my time in Cambridge, so I was thrilled to see Ethan would be speaking at TEDGlobal this past week.  His talk was another of the highlights of the conference, and one of particular relevance for those of us interested in how the access to information that the Internet affords impacts development.

In essence Ethan said that while we perceive the Internet to indicate a globally connected world, in reality the information we consume is confined to like-minded microcosms.  We end up in “filter bubbles,” interacting with people we already know, which isn’t how the Internet was supposed to be.  The media, he says, is less global by the day.  New media isn’t helping us that much after all. 

The reason?  The tools we use to access the information available to us via the Internet are great at helping us find the information we’re looking for, but fail to engineer serendipitous encounters with information you don’t know you need.  We look to our social network for this type of content, and as a consequence find ourselves in like-minded flocks.

This is an issue because real and interesting problems global in scale and scope, require global conversations to get to global solutions.

The way to get out, Zuckerman says, is to find someone who will bump you out of your flock.  Bridge figures like Erik Hersman (nice shout out to @whiteafrican in his talk!) can play this role, since are connected to multiple worlds.  He also says we should cultivate xenophiles, who will cross the bridge and bring the message back home.

While this all makes great sense to me, I wonder if the bridge figures and xenophiles would only take us so far.  This is actually something I wrote about awhile back in a blog posting here.  As my former professor David King explained, the world is getting narrower as the information we have access to becomes broader.  The more we have to process, the more we’re forced to rely on more efficient mechanisms to process that information.  In doing so we succumb to confirmation bias, tuning into channels that confirm what we already believe.   By contrast when we only had a few channels to tune into (i.e. before the era of cable television), we by necessity of the diversity of the audience consumed a diversity of information.

If this is true (and it makes sense to me) then we’d seek out bridge figures who would only bump us so far out of the flock.  My hunch is the reality of our psychology will make addressing this problem even harder than Ethan suggests.