In researching and writing about technology, it’s easy to focus on the tools themselves: the sleekly attention-grabbing application and the mysterious expertise of a machine learning model spark curiosity. Centering platforms scratches an itch for novelty but brings the huge risk of missing the proverbial forest for the specific tree.
Tuesday’s conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Mary L. Gray (hosted by the Berkman Klein Center and moderated by Joan Donovan) highlighted how their work shares a focus on people and communities, especially communities that are regularly marginalized.
Dr. Gray described her approach as
“Part of my career has been finding the people that people think are hard to find. And they’re not hard to find. We don’t look for them. In many ways, the politics of visibility are about looking at the construction of who’s seen and not seen. How is that amplified? How is that muted? And to see those as power moves all the way through... Centering their experience starts with drawing the readers’ attention to reflect on why they’re hearing something or hearing from someone they’ve never heard from before. That’s about them, that’s not about those people.”
Dr. Cottom noted that in her work, it’s more challenging to connect to the presumed reader than to the people she studies.
“It’s not hard for me to center Black people in my work because I think Black people are human beings. That’s actually the easiest part of my work. The question for me is ‘why is that so hard for you?’
“One of the most gratifying reader responses I get is that white men love to write me. I get so many letters that overwhelmingly start the same way “I know I’m not your audience but…” and it’s fascinating to me how similar the construction of that is across a categorical group of people, because what I think they’re fundamentally saying is ‘you made me care about something I have a lot of incentives not to care about.’ What it signals to me is that I found the most basic unit of shared humanity in an argument, I found the weakness in their own ideological scaffolding.”
Has misinformation become a boogeyman?
A recent Knight/Gallup survey found that “Four in five Americans are concerned — either very (48%) or somewhat (33%) — that misinformation on social media will sway the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.” It’s an astonishing degree of agreement in public opinion. It may also signal that a research focus on the tools and tactics has drawn public attention away from the broader trends contributing to political polarization.
As Shannon McGregor described it, “Our field’s focus on misinformation, instead of the interplay between social identity and racism, sexism, other isms, and electoral decisions has inflamed fears within the public that undermine trust in information and make it less likely for us as a nation to have any shared truths.”
While misinformation research is an important field of study, no current evidence suggests direct effects on the scale of changing the outcome of a national election. The survey results suggest that fears about misinformation, then, have become the focus of attention for people trying to understand or address these divides – potentially at the cost of understanding and addressing other critical factors.
Getting out the vote!
Speaking of people-centered research: in my past work as a civic technologist, I interviewed many voters about their experiences in order to make the process simpler and more welcoming. One obvious-once-you-see-it lesson was that people wait to be invited to take part. Very few voters simply register themselves to vote without being asked – whether by a high-school counselor, a DMV clerk, or a canvasser, the path to democratic participation typically starts with an invitation.
So today, I’ll ask each of you: if you’re eligible to do so, have you voted yet? If not, have you made plans – decided when and where to go, how you’ll get there, and looked over what will be on the ballot? If you have, congratulations! I hope you’ll invite three friends or family members to vote as well. If you haven’t, I highly recommend howto.vote, gettothepolls.com, ballotpedia.org, and ballotready.org as tools that can help you prepare.
CITAP publications and appearances:
Zeynep Tufekci spoke with Sam Gill about social media platforms, polarization, and much more for the Future of Democracy series:
Daniel Kreiss joined a panel of UNC experts on the 2020 election:
The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo cited Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis’s work on media manipulation.
Shannon McGregor appeared on the Radical AI podcast to talk about social media and the election:
Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan cited Shannon McGregor’s work on social media as a source of public opinion insight in their op-ed on the divide between political junkies and everyone else.