EXP-50-CS
CLASS #6, 2/25/14
I N F O R M AT I O N , C R O W D S O U R C I N G A N D
T H E B I A S OF T H E F I LT E R B U B B L E
TUFTS UNIVERSITY
JESSE LITTLEWOOD
A B O U T. M E / J E S S E . L I T T L E W O O D
@J_LITTLEWOOD

AGENDA
• Twitter
• Lightning Talks:
•
Gerson
•
• Next week
Cristina
• Recap of Last Week
• Information, Crowdsourcing
and the Filter Bubble
• Mid-Semester Evals

TWO SURVEYS OF INTERNET USERS
• boyd and Hargittai
• Youth apparently do care about
privacy, and often change their
settings
•
•
K
E
• Pew Research Center
E ads
• 28% try to hide from
W
T
S
Ause a fake name or nickname
• L
36%
M
Typically more worried about O
•
R
other people seeing you than
F
P
institutions
A
C
E you are with
•
R
More familiar
technology, more likely you are to
engage in privacy settings
33% are against internet
anonymity
Young people do more to hide
• … young people have more online

Z U C K E R B E R G I N 2 0 1 0 O N P R I VA C Y
• "When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why
K
E
would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a
website?'
E
W
T really gotten comfortable
services that have people sharing all this information. People have
Smore openly and with more
A
not only sharing more information and different kinds, but
L over time.
people. That social norm is just something that has evolved
M
O
R
"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our
F social norms are.
system is to reflect what the current
P
A be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've
C
"A lot of companies would
E change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of
built, doingR
a privacy
• "And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different
•
•
thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to
always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now
and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

T H E M E S S AG E FAC E B O O K U S E R S S AW I N D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9 .
R
source: http://
firstmonday.org/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/
viewArticle/3086/2589
C
E
P
A
R
F
M
O
A
L
T
S
E
W
K
E

AD BLOCKING
P
A
• https://adblockplus.org
R
C
E
R
F
M
O
A
L
T
S
E
W
K
E

CROWD WISDOM
• Francis Galton
• “The Wisdom of Crowds”
• Guess the weight of the oxen
!
• Scott E. Page
• Diversity equals productivity
• Trumps “IQ”
Pedigree Alnwick Shorthorn bull “Sunstreak”,
photographed by Sir Francis Galton

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
• Patrick Conway
• Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO)
• U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command
• Communities of practice — old communication methods are too slow
• 165k people communicating
• Only once did they have to ban someone — and it was for being
offensive

DUMBNESS OF CROWDS
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.html

B I G O N L I N E N E T W O R K S T H AT A R E N ’ T
FAC E B O O K
• Wikipedia: http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en
• Twitter: http://tweetping.net/
• Reddit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGs_7Yted8

S O M U C H I N F O W H AT D O ?
!
• Information diet?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNFNOSzik14

G O O G L E F I LT E R S T H E I N T E R N E T
• Google PageRank
• In essence, Google interprets a link
from page A to page B as a vote, by
page A, for page B.
• Votes cast by pages that are
themselves “important” weigh more
heavily and help to make other
pages “important.”
• Not a directory.

• Filtering systems for your
own feed.
• How do you manage your
own information sources?
• Aggregators like
news.me/Digg
• Hashtags and search
• Muting/unfriending
• What else?

CONTENT SHOCK
• Exponentially increasing volumes of
content intersect our limited human
capacity to consume it. — Mark Schaefer
• 1) Deep pockets win
• 2) The entry barriers become impossibly
high
• 3) The cost-benefits flip
• Facebook says: On a given day, when
someone visits News Feed, there are an
average of 1,5001 possible stories we can
show.
www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/06/content-shock/

• Eli Pariser: The Filter Bubble
• http://www.ted.com/talks/
eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

• Bing Elections 2012 lets you choose your own filter bubble

• Next Week:
• Journalism
• Talks by:
• Danyelle
• Tara
• Leila

NEXT WEEK: JOURNALISM
• Reading:
• Stray, Jonathan. Are we stuck in filter bubbles? Here are five potential paths out. July 11, 2012.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/are-we-stuck-in-filter-bubbles-here-are-five-potentialpaths-out/
• Mele, Nicco. The End of Big. Chapter 2 “Big News” http://nicco.org/readings/eobchapter2.pdf
• Johnson, Steven. Future Perfect: The Case For Progress in a Networked Age. Chapter:
Journalism: The Pothole Paradox.
• Shirky, Clay. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. March 13, 2009. http://
www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
• Starkman, Dean. Confidence Game - The limited vision of the news gurus. Colombia
Journalism Review. Nov. 8, 2011. http://www.cjr.org/essay/confidence_game.php?page=all