Does Twitter Lead to a Monoculture?

Under the skin, all exactly the same…

Yet another new piece of software for Twitter, this one called Twittertrends, now allows everyone to see what top ten topics everyone else is twittering about at any given moment.

As Techcrunch says “it’s an awesome way for people to track what’s going on”.

Yes…

But it may also lead to something far less desirable – a rise in a monoculture.

That is, everyone essentially doing or thinking the same two or three things all the time.

Recent research in fact seems to demonstrate that web-driven information, rather than enhancing a wide range of choices tends to polarize and calcify.

It’s a rather sobering piece of information in a relatively new field of study – online information impact.

In “Global Village or Cyber-Balkans”, an article that appeared in Management Science in 2005, and which was later cited in The Big Switch (Carr),   Eric Brynjolfsson and Marshall Van Alstyne write that:

Our analysis suggests that automatic search tools and filters that route communications among people based on their views, reputations, past statements or personal characteristics are not necessarily benign in their effects.

Shaped by online tools and information, online communities or those informed by them in fact tend to become less diverse in their opinions than in the physical world.

This polarization is, in some ways, part of the far deeper natural human desire to conform.

Up until now, we just were not really too well informed as to what to conform to.  Now we are.

And with twitter, instant communication across a vast network, married to a tool that even informs us of the predominant twitter topics , we create a kind of defacto hierarchy of information an opinion – one that apparently most people both gravite towards and obey.

Actually, we can already see this kind of monoculture in politics. Political blogs have divided into two clearly defined camps, from which there is no crossing over.

In 2005, two researchers Lada Adamic of Hewlett-Packard (and again here I am indebted to Carr), and Natalie Glance of Infoseek published Divided They Blog. They tracked more than 1000 political blogs during the 2004 election and discovered an ‘unmistakable’ division between liberal and conservative. In fact, 91% of the links from either blog stay within or reinforce the original view of the base blog.

And that was a long time ago, in webworld, and long before blogs.

We have moved on, but as the infospace expands and become ever more interactive, it may prove to be true that instead of creating a world that is more diverse in opinion and taste, we will create one that is in fact more sterile and less diverse.

Cass Sunstein, law professor at the University of Chicago writes:

When like-minded people cluster, they often aggravate their biases, spreading falsehoods. They end up in a more extreme position in line with their tendencies before the deliberation began”.

It may be the case that more information rather than tending to expand choices and opinions in fact narrows and calcifies them.

This may seem to be a bad thing, but for newspapers, television networks, or indeed anyone else seeking to carve out and hold a market share, it could be encouraging news.

The path toward grabbing and holding a share of the media market in the world of the web may lie not only in airing a program that is ‘interesting’ or garners ratings, but rather in building and creating an online environment that creates and sustains a community-wide sentiment that the product or the show (or the paper for that matter) is of seminal importance, interest or value.

In other words, flood the blogosphere or twitterworld with focused messages to drive the greater community to your product, and apparently, the world will beat a path to your door – and stay there forever  – or as long as you keep feeding them.