COMP650 Learning Diary

Author: Lance Hathaway

  • Week 7: Legal and Ethical Issues (part 2)

    At one point, I was coordinating a group of about 20 people playing a geospatial game, using a private group on a Slack instance. We had recently removed a very problematic member from the Slack (he openly admitted to stalking and threatening female players on both teams because he believed they “deserved it”) and he was very upset by being ejected from the community. As I was an admin for the Slack, he also blamed me for executing the community’s decision and terminating his account.

    So at this point, the person was not in the Slack instance at all, let alone in the private group.

    While I was coordinating everybody, this problematic (former) member opened a message to me through Google Chat. I observed in Slack that he was messaging me, and I immediately received a physical threat in Google Chat to stop talking about him, or he would find and assault me offline. I observed in Slack that he was now threatening me as well, and he immediately responded in Google Chat by increasing his threats.

    Clearly, there was a breach in security here. It disturbed me on multiple levels. Not only was this person clearly privy to general conversations on the server, but also in this ostensibly private group. We had removed him because of his behaviors, and yet clearly he felt safe and anonymous enough to issue threats to stalk and then physically assault me, while revealing that he had still had access to the community in some fashion or another. It would have been one thing to say maybe a new account had been created that slipped through vetting… but in this private group of roughly 20 people, all were accounted for and known players. That left either service compromise, account compromise, or some player’s active collaboration with somebody who was known to be actively trying to do harm to the community’s members. And receiving threats of physical harm in an attempt to intimidate me was also distasteful, to say the least.

    What disturbed me about this? The violation of trust, for one–this was supposed to be a team-only server, and then a private group within that team, with people who were all known and trusted to keep their accounts secured. The service itself was not known to be compromised, and the problem person was not technically accomplished enough to a point where I believed him capable of creating a new compromise. That left active collaboration… but that should have been almost unthinkable.

    Further, we had evicted the person from the team because his actions were a threat to player physical safety. He also continually referred to himself in Messianic terms, and that created additional concern for people–there was real possibility that he might decide somebody “deserved” to be assaulted, and he would then follow through on that because he, as the main character, was inevitably correct and justified in everything he did. He literally could do no wrong in his own eyes. While we had contacted law enforcement, we had been told that they could not do anything unless a law was actually broken. That’s understandable, but the community needed to protect itself before somebody was seriously hurt or killed by this aggressor.

    However, there were some people in the team who felt that the person was just playing a persona and was cool to hang out with. They were against removing this person from the community, but had acquiesced to majority opinion when the person wouldn’t apologize or moderate his behavior.

    I don’t (and never will) know why this person thought he was a Messianic figure, or why he felt this justified stalking, harassing, and threatening physical harm against people who didn’t give him the adulation he thought he deserved. Perhaps the most logical explanation I can construct is that he was mentally disturbed and needed expert attention or medication. Most of the alternate hypotheses I can see essentially boil down to the supposition that he is, simply, an evil person.

    In this particular case, we have some information on how this was able to happen. One of the players in the private group was in a relationship with the problematic person, and had left herself logged into Slack. He simply used her access. Now, accounts differ as to whether she had “accidentally” left herself logged in (and he used her access without her active participation), or whether she had deliberately left herself logged in as a way of partially assuaging his fury at having been evicted from the community. Either way, it was not service compromise, nor was it strictly speaking an account compromise… merely a misuse.

    There are a host of solutions that could be proposed for this situation. Perhaps the first one that deserves examination is the response of offline authorities: while the RCMP were not in a position to deal with someone who had not yet committed a crime (and I agree that they had no basis on which to intervene, much as we may have wanted them to), the behavior exhibited and admitted was still very problematic. So, perhaps a different sort of intervention, something similar to calling upon child protection services where, if multiple reports were submitted, somebody might be required to go for assessment. Optimally, I would like their online behavior and offline movements to also be tracked, to ensure they do not lash out at people, but this I believe would cross a line–we are still, after all, talking about somebody who has not necessarily taken any unlawful actions. If the goal is to get them help, then actions which feel overly punitive are likely to be counterproductive.

    On the technical side of things, there are ways that services can allow users to expire all their user sessions at once. Admins can also trigger this for specific users, sometimes. But here lies a problem with that course of action: we did not know, at the time the threats were being made, whose access was being used to allow the problem person to snoop on a community from which he had been evicted. It might be handy to have a method to “instant re-lock” a private group, immediately suspending everybody’s access and forcing them to reauthenticate on the spot… but that will not prevent other players from intentionally reauthenticating and then allowing the problem person to maintain access under their credentials. It’s also an incredibly blunt tool–you would essentially penalize 19 “good” players by forcing reauthentication on all their devices, for the sake of rooting out the 1 “bad” player whose access was being misused (when they might just bypass it again anyway). And as group sizes go up, the number of people inconvenienced for the sake of attempting to block out the one problem account would increase as well.

    It’s also important to consider possible DoS attacks, for both of these proposed “solutions”. That is, if sufficient people submit reports, could somebody be unwillingly pushed to go for assessment? Yes, clearly! Similarly, assume some scallywag decides to keep hitting the “instant re-lock” button for funsies. That would also cause no end of troubles for everybody in the group, and could functionally lock them out of the community for longer periods of time. (I find that the flip-side of security is often outright denial of service, whether that is voluntarily, involuntarily, or self inflicted.)

  • Week 7: Legal and Ethical Issues (part 1)

    Mance, H. (2019, July 18). Is privacy dead? Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/c4288d72-a7d0-11e9-984c-fac8325aaa04

    • The problem with “mutually assured surveillance” is that power is not equally shared. More and more, those with power bend the laws to their own whim–or simply ignore them as inconvenient gnats to be swatted aside. Surveillance may capture police misdeeds, but how many of those actually face the same repercussions that regular citizens would? And how many of them get some form of immunity or deference to the assumption that they were “just trying to do their job”? Turn and witness how many people in the US currently are being deported against court orders, or being grabbed off the streets and out of courtrooms without any chance to invoke due process! Power is distributed asymmetrically, and without power, surveillance cannot be acted upon.
    • Privacy is a hindsight problem only for those who have always had it. I grew up in a house where my parents decided to remove my bedroom door so that I would have no privacy in my own room, where showers could be interrupted by somebody flinging aside the curtain with no warning, where all access to outside media (newspapers, books, TV, movies, Internet, radio) was strictly monitored and controlled, where even schooling was delivered in the home and friends were generally only seen at church. Where even imagination was monitored and adjudicated to be permissible or evidence of demonic possession. Privacy is not a hindsight problem to me. It is a foresight problem. From my perspective, everybody else is suffering from a lack of foresight, imagination, experience, or all of the above.
    • Google may say the right words about us being in control of our data, but notably, they reserve the right to use that data at their whim among their own properties. Don’t listen to their words; read their terms of service.
    • “Informed consent” is often not informed at all. How many people just click “Accept” to move on without reading anything? That they chose to move forward didn’t make their consent “informed”! Companies don’t have to put a pile of legalese in front of us; it’s entirely possible to have a plain language terms of service saying what kinds of things you will and won’t do, and why. “We need the right to ‘republish’ the content you submit so that we can display your uploaded avatar and journal posts to others. We won’t do anything else with it without your express permission.” That would be simple and honest! Doesn’t take five pages of legal boilerplate.
    • You know what could be done? Mandatory de-identification upon data export from any system, or any time the purpose changes. If you have home surveillance cameras, you should be able to view the feed yourself, within that system. Export the data to post something on YouTube, and all faces are automatically blurred, timestamps scrubbed, etc. Any time a company is bought out by a competitor, all customer data is automatically wiped (and customers can choose whether to re-enter their data in the new company system). If police need to see something from your home cameras, they can come over and videotape the screen.

    You know, I administer systems absolutely stuffed with personal data. Not just in a business context! I also work with a non-profit serving a community with many people who would face incredibly adverse consequences if their membership in the community became known. That could be loss of housing, loss of employment, or worse. We need personal data in order to secure events and address problem individuals, but privacy is fiercely guarded. Our community entrusts us with their information–sometimes very reluctantly–and it’s a responsibility I have to take seriously.

    I’ve occasionally considered my ethical obligations if I were to be directed to move that data to an open, insecure, unaudited platform, or if the organization decided to share that data for marketing purposes or something of that sort. Is my greater obligation to the organization who has legally collected that data and on whose behalf I manage the system, or to the community who entrusted their personal information to us for a specific purpose in a specific context? Would I be prepared to unilaterally erase the database and face whatever consequences came from that action? Can I hide behind the cloak of “Well, I didn’t know for sure that this would happen…” or would that just be a convenient lie to try and make myself feel better?

    The answer will always depend on the exact circumstances, and so I can never know for sure in advance what my decision would be. But it’s something I regularly ask myself, even so.

  • Week 6 Reflections

    I had expected the readings to be somewhat difficult for me this week. They largely weren’t, which surprised me. Even “A Rape in Cyberspace,” which you might expect to be at least a bit of an uncomfortable read, wasn’t. Not so much.

    You know what it was, though? Familiar. The group dynamics afterward, as various members of the group tried to sort out where they stood… I’ve been there, in the role of an admin (or the wizard, in that scenario). I’ve seen the people advocating for lenience after lenience, even after the most heinous stunts. I’ve seen the offenders, casual and flippant as they declare that nothing really matters anyway and nobody can stop them. And I’ve seen people wrestle with reconciling a laissez-faire outlook against the moral clarity that wrong has been done and demands a response of some sort.

    Reading about the viewpoint of the trolls was incredibly difficult. I wasn’t surprised by how much it wound me up, but I was surprised that I still wasn’t able to set that aside and examine it objectively from a purely academic standpoint. Even when I was trying to do so. Maybe that’s a strength, or maybe that’s a weakness… but it is, if nothing else, a fact.

    I’m not sure that my thoughts on modifying group conversations are useful. I’m 100% sure that the functionality can be implemented, and in a privacy-respecting fashion, but I’m not as confident on whether any of it is a good idea in practice. I’m wary of building systems that will cause groups to fracture as the networks present rapidly become disjoint. At what point does the cure become worse than the disease? But even as unsure as I am about the wisdom of those changes, they are what I might currently propose as an effort to help curtail known problems in that environment.

    I wish I didn’t have to reflect on the problem of evil. There’s too much of that in the world as it is, and I want to explore the good things that can be built. I’m already aware of many of the problems. But it’s always going to be useful to revisit and reflect and ensure that nothing has been overlooked as knowledge and experience increase. So it may be uncomfortable, but I don’t believe that it’s without merit. It just leaves me feeling rather hopeless about the entire thing, is all.

    Field Trip #2: This time we met up in Gather! I haven’t ever seen or touched Gather before, so this was a fascinating experience. I honestly found the 8-bit style of interface to be really nostalgic. Like, this is right back to Furcadia and the pixelated MUDs / MOOs of old, but right in the browser and much more responsive. Less command-heavy, too.

    (Actually, I started off by installing the client software, but couldn’t figure out how to connect to the target world. Worked a lot better once in the browser.)

    I ran around for a while looking at the general way the public and private areas work, the desks, and everything else. And at first, I was really quite excited by this. I could immediately see how amazing this could be to replicate an office environment. Even if you were working from home, you could “be” in the office and walk around to have conversations with people.

    But the more I thought about it… the more I wondered why we would want to do that. Typically, if we’re working from home, we’re busy. I mean, helpdesk will be answering phone calls and working on customer systems. “Walking around” is more something the senior techs or project folks or managers do. What I was really thinking of was COVID! During COVID, none of us could see or interact with each other for weeks on end, and I imagine we would have welcomed some virtual socialization in a virtual office… but thankfully, we’re not dealing with a pandemic all the time. And absent that kind of external blockade on all socialization, I think the appeal of having a “virtual office” would quickly wear off and not be worth it.

    And then everybody else arrived and we could start experimenting. 🙂

    I liked how the video and audio faded in as you approached people. That’s a great feature. The games were adequate, but nothing to write home about. In a pandemic, that might suffice for a “staff outing” for half an hour or something (before people moved on to real games outside of Gather). The “follow me” feature was a good idea, and I can see that being especially useful in a larger virtual environment. I also liked the variety in sizes of private space. You could have a few people around a desk, or a one-on-one in a couple of chairs across a coffee table, or a solo “quiet” working environment, or a meeting room that bypassed the distance-based faders of public space–in the meeting room, everybody could see and hear everybody else, regardless of distance. That amount of variety seemed like it was well-considered.

    I think this is going to go into my bag of tech-tricks. Probably not something I’m going to suggest outside of another pandemic, but I like it and want to keep an eye on it.

  • Week 6: The Problem of Evil (part 3)

    So, for improving a social system, I’m going to look at Telegram. First, though, let’s state the context, our problems, and our goals.

    Telegram is most often used in a direct-message manner, but it also offers “channels” or group messaging. I’m specifically going to look at a channel with a group of people who are all involved in a specific task. Everybody has the ability to post messages.

    In this context, the problems I see mostly revolve around what people post. This is a non-exhaustive list, but they may:

    • post hurtful content without prompting
    • post hurtful content in reaction to the posts of others
    • spread rumors (outside of the channel) to instigate a mob response within the channel

    The ideal, of course, would be to stop or trap harmful content before it can be seen. But in my experience, an automated solution will not be as effective here as could be desired–the context of the channel may not fit the assumptions of whoever coded the bot or trained the model, and that could lead to a mismatch between the automated solution and what should be permitted or blocked.

    My goal, then, is to allow participants to, in essence, selectively withdraw their commentary from other participants in the group. I would like to do this in a way that isn’t as catastrophic as leaving the entire group, and ideally in a way that doesn’t try to force the group to “choose sides” (which could lead to the group fracturing repeatedly).

    One solution I might propose is what I will call “silencing.” This works similarly to blocking somebody, except that ideally, the block goes both ways–if Participant A silences Participant B, then not only does A stop seeing B, but B should also stop seeing A’s posts and responses. This handily prevents the first two points on my list of goals, as B’s hurtful content will no longer be visible to A, and B will also be deprived of A’s posts–there is no need to provide A’s information to B for B to use in others hurtful ways. No notification of this action need be provided to either participant, or to any channel participants at large, to avoid the action creating more agitation.

    A second solution I might propose is a “time out” function. In concept, this is similar to muting a channel (by disallowing notifications for a general time period) or leaving a channel altogether. The difference is, even when muted, the temptation remains to check the channel and see what people are doing–only notifications have ceased. In “time out,” the channel is no longer even visible or accessible. This function should be available to individual users (to put themselves in time out) and to channel admins (to put any user into time out). Where an individual has put themselves into time out, they should be able to navigate into their settings menu and explicitly choose to “time in”. Where an admin has placed somebody into time out, user override is not permitted.

    This creates a stage in between disabling notifications and having to depart the channel altogether, and can be used in different ways:

    1. The individual user is feeling “ganged up on” or mobbed, and chooses to time out with the intention of coming back later. Other channel participants can see that the user has “departed” and can no longer be messaged via the channel. The client should not prompt the user or automatically time back in of its own accord. Given the user’s curiosity might lead to trying to “sneak a peek,” the “time in” option is placed in the settings menu to ensure that the user is fully ready to re-enter participation. Upon timing back in, the user resumes participation as desired. Other channel participants can see the user has returned, but no channel-wide “join” announcement is made.
    2. An admin sees somebody posting harmful content, and they will not be dissuaded. From past experience, the admin knows this is atypical behavior for the participant, and suspects the participant is suffering some form of altered experience (whether by substance intoxication, mental strain, or otherwise). They place the participant into “time out” as a way of isolating the participant until they are ready to return without causing further damage. This is less damaging than outright evicting the participant from the channel. Other channel participants see the same messages as described above in scenario #1. The participant who was placed into time out sees an administrative message indicating that they were placed into time out by an admin, with the ability to directly contact that admin. Any channel admin should be able to time the user back in, but the originating admin’s info is given for accountability and to allow the timed-out user to be able to speak directly to the person who placed them into that state.

    There are, of course, some loopholes that remain. Even if A silences B, A’s posts are still visible to Participant C, who can act as a relay. If C does act as a relay, this act of relaying may also not be visible to A. This is, therefore, not a complete solution on its own–group norms should be established to ask before relaying information that somebody “missed” or “didn’t see.” Even so, this still doesn’t solve the problem of actual malevolence, but I judge that dealing with actual malevolence would likely require much stronger measures anyhow.

    “Time out” is vulnerable to abuse by admins. It might be tempting to use this as a sort of “silencing” group-wide, short of actually kicking somebody out. But by its design, the message shown to other group participants is that the user in time out has “departed” the channel; there’s no benefit to an admin to put somebody in time out if their intent is to silence them permanently, as it looks like the same thing as having kicked them out fully. Potential abuse is also limited by allowing other admins to time the user back in, and by making the originating admin’s identity clear to the timed out user (with that admin also being able to be directly contacted).

  • Week 6: The Problem of Evil (part 2)

    Is it necessary, in order to truly combat evil, to become evil yourself?

    Let’s start by noting that I am usually very, very forgiving by nature. I like to help people. If somebody understands that they messed something up, I’m all about moving past the error, offering education or suggestions for next time, and encouraging them along the way.

    What I have much, much more difficulty with is the people who don’t care to improve, or are actively seeking to cause harm. Trolls, for example–they’re not just trying to wind people up. They’re actively causing harm, and they glory in it, believing that they are somehow above it all, or that the person they persecute “deserves” to suffer for having something as archaic as emotions.

    I would gladly rid the world of all of them. But I have the damndest time trying to reconcile this emotive response with the logical understanding that people do change and evolve over time. A troll that I would erase from existence today may be a changed person tomorrow. “May be”… but not especially likely to be. And the longer they are left to infect a community, or society in general, the greater the damage that can result.

    I imagine that most people would say that anybody who would wave a magic wand to instantly vaporize hundreds or thousands of people would be, by definition, evil. And therein lies my struggle: I know that change is possible. I believe that change is unlikely. I believe that the harm caused is grievous. I believe that preventing harm is a good thing. But erasing people from existence is… not. And the ends do not justify the means.

    I have certainly suffered. I’ve suffered the people who torment because they can get a reaction out of you. I’ve also been the admin, trying to police a community according to its own posted standards, granting a troll a second chance. And been taunted for it, taunted for being weak! And when the community had something like a 55/45 split of people wanting to see the troll removed for justification, I removed the troll–with the other 45% baying for all the admins’ heads for being so intolerant and exclusionary and unaccountable! Stirred up by the troll who cried those crocodile tears, while turning around and taunting and threatening others. Like, issuing physical threats against others, including myself. Nothing provable or actionable, of course, but enough to make people afraid.

    There are others who will offer a pleasant, sociable smile in public, but stir up trouble behind your back. Who delight in fomenting a mob to “cancel” whoever they decide to throw an unfounded accusation against. If you fight them, you become the aggressor. If you stand by, you let them poison the community and teach others to do the same. If you try to remove them, they will fight tooth and nail to stay, delighting in being wherever they are told they cannot be.

    And my experiences are not the worst. There are so many others who have suffered far, far worse. But even that taste has set me implacably against all the trolls, forever.

  • Week 6: The Problem of Evil (part 1)

    Dibbell, J. (1993, December 23). A rape in cyberspace: How an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database Into a society. The Village Voice. https://web.archive.org/web/19970612100454/http://www.levity.com/julian/bungle.html

    • Let’s start with multiverse theory, yes? Let us say that there is an infinite number of universes out there. Then anything we can think of or imagine has in fact happened, in some universe, somewhere.
    • In many ways, I view creativity and imagination as portals to another world, almost quite literally. Under multiverse theory, it has happened–we could be said to merely be recording that which happened elsewhere, in another place, in another reality.
    • With that in mind, I have therefore always viewed words and thoughts as so much more than “just” words and thoughts. They have deep impact. They have meaning. If you want to imagine somebody causing grievous bodily harm, know that they have. If you want to emote doing something quite nasty to somebody else online, you have good as actually done it–because somewhere, you actually have.
    • I know that my perspective on this is unique, but it means that I have never approached the virtual world of cyberspace as a realm without consequence. (Even offline imagination, after all, has a consequence–for the person imagining, if nobody else.) The identities we construct online have weight and being. If an identity becomes attached to the self as an alternate, pseudonymous persona, then the actions taken towards and words said to that identity now directly impact the person behind them. They are one and the same.
    • I also believe quite strongly that communities must be able to defend themselves from those who would inflict harm upon them. Particularly when those “evildoers” don’t believe that the harm even exists, and treat their actions as though they have no consequence.

    Jhaver, S., Birman, I., Gilbert, E., & Bruckman, A. (2019, July). Human-machine collaboration for content regulation: The case of Reddit Automoderator. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 26(5), https://doi.org/10.1145/3338243

    • Before I get too far into the paper, I would say that I consider Reddit to have one of the better content regulation models in terms of the feedback available and number of “levels” to regulation. Users can upvote and downvote, or flag content. Subreddits can have multiple moderators looking after just that particular subreddit, and these are often volunteers with deep experience in their area, meaning they better understand what is allowable or undesirable in that specific subreddit. The signals being sent by the other redditors can influence a moderator’s view on a specific comment or post, if it even gets that far–some comments or posts may be “downvoted into oblivion” by redditors before a mod ever gets involved! Reddit’s paid staffers are much further up the stack, and need only be involved relatively infrequently.
    • I would say that this is a general rule: trust increases relative to transparency. Greater transparency usually leads to greater trust. And while human mods might start with the benefit of the doubt from human readers, bots generally do not. Including transparency on exactly why an action was taken is an extremely important feature to have, and I would say the same is even more true for “AI” tools as those become more commonplace. (Even more so because a neural net may not be “debuggable” in the same way as a list of regexs; the explanation generated may be the human mod’s only clue as to why something happened the way it did.)
    • It’s correct that those who are technically proficient in a particular skill will usually be called upon to use that proficiency more often. Other mods may have the access, but not the same skill. I’ve been in that situation, and I’ll usually willingly accept being the single point of control for many of the same reasons highlighted in the paper–it’s easier, I already know everything that’s happening, and I can debug much faster. But I hadn’t recognized explicitly that this creates additional burdens for those of us taking on that responsibility, with no specific recognition or reward for doing so.

    Mannell, K. & Smith, E. T. (2022, September 14). It’s hard to imagine better social media alternatives, but Scuttlebutt shows change is possible. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/its-hard-to-imagine-better-social-media-alternatives-but-scuttlebutt-shows-change-is-possible-190351

    • It’s always been possible to build a platform (or tools, more generally) for public benefit rather than profit. The tricky bit, in my mind, has always been the fact of running the damn thing, never mind the governance of it! If it’s too technical to set up (and let’s face it, people who want to build a platform for public benefit tend to be very technically-oriented), you’re going to have problems with adoption, even among those who would like to use the system for that public benefit! If it’s too simple to set up, you’ve probably either made the system insecure by using too open a default, or made it secure by default but restricted the ability for other people to be able to build on that platform and make changes (because the vast majority of default installs will not accept those changes).
    • In some ways, this “fediverse” problem is also seen in Mastodon and Bluesky. In Mastodon, setting up a server and determining how to federate it with others is a massive undertaking; in Bluesky, setting up your own personal data server or relay may similarly be a technical challenge to accomplish. Without a centralized system to bind everything together, having to always “roll your own” is an ongoing challenge that can honestly become quite a drag!
    • Governance also becomes a much greater challenge in a public-benefit platform. It’s not impossible, of course. In a for-profit model, you can pay people of diverse perspectives to bring their expertise into the corporation. In a public benefit model, you’re probably looking for volunteers. Not just that, but volunteers with good character and determination–you don’t have profit as a motivator, so you have to be more careful that they’re working for the same ultimate goal and won’t disappear if the correct decisions aren’t profitable enough. And as if that wasn’t difficult enough to find, you also would like it if they had needed technical skills, decent social skills, and maybe brought some diversity to the table as well?

    Santana, A. D. (2014, ). Virtuous or vitriolic. Journalism Practice, 8(1), 18-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.813194

    • For some people, accountability acts as a check on their wayward nature. Some do not require as much accountability, but it is a fool who would solely trust another’s nature! And it is usually those who are least in need of accountability who best understand the necessity of it! The problem we see writ large online is that… most people do not have the moral core to comport themselves justly in the shadows as well as in the light of day.
    • The EFF makes an excellent point here–the sacrifice of anonymity (or pseudonymity) may not be necessary if there are more effective alternatives at hand. Techdirt, for example, allows both anonymous and pseudonymous comments, and while some people are still less than civil, most of the commenters there behave themselves reasonably well. The community polices itself, and does not need to unmask its members to do so.
    • Interesting that, of the six factors listed which make incivil discourse more likely, the two I lack are dissociative anonymity (because I believe that online actions, even when anonymous, are inextricably linked to the offline self because they are the product of the soul) and dissociative imagination (because I believe that online actions have real consequences, and closing the browser cannot / should not shield you from the reality of those consequences).
    • It’s always possible, of course, that smaller communities are more capable of self-policing, as each contributing member’s efforts will be more visible and not diluted against a background avalanche of uncivil commentary. Perhaps that should also be taken into consideration…

    Sherchan, W., Nepal, S., & Paris, C. (2013, August). A survey of trust in social networks. ACM Comput. Surv. 45(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2501654.2501661

    • This “social trust” thing sounds reasonable, and yet my immediate response is, “What do you do about individuals who hold a fair amount of social capital, and yet display themselves to be inherently socially untrustworthy?” That is, they and their actions clearly have weight, and yet they will always betray confidences and take whatever course of actions benefits them most in the moment. Speaking from experience, I cannot and do not trust these people, no matter how much social capital they hold, no matter how positive the interactions may be. And any channel in which they exist is, by their presence, marked as untrustworthy.
    • I will note that this paper explicitly defines trust as the expectation that somebody will behave as expected. You could argue that an untrustworthy individual who acts in an untrustworthy fashion is actually trusted–because they are acting as expected! And yet the entire facade is designed to lull people into believing that they will behave one way, before they reveal their true selves and take a different action. I have learned, through painful experience, to expect this, but their actions actively seek to create a false expectation. And it feels very odd to say that they are trusted in spite of their efforts to act in an untrustworthy fashion, explicitly because I ignore what they are trying to do and instead choose to (correctly) anticipate their next heel turn.
    • I would agree that the Internet has had neither a utopian nor a dystopian effect in the social context. However, I do disagree that we have experienced “a fundamental transformation in the nature of community from groups to social networks.” A social network also exists within an offline group; all we have done is extend that network via the new connections we can create (or existing connections we can reinforce–constructively or destructively!) online.
    • The “Web of Trust” model is best known to me from OpenPGP, where I would determine whether I had full trust, partial trust, or no trust in the holder of another key. This was separate from whether I had verified the key myself–it’s entirely possible to have verified a key and trust that the key itself belongs to a particular individual, but have no reason to trust any decisions that individual makes about what other keys to trust!
    • The biggest problem with the Web of Trust is that it requires a lot of effort to do correctly. It’s rather normal to find people who shortcut their decisions and choose to trust basically everybody’s assessments blindly. That’s a huge, huge hole in the model’s assumptions, and it comes of the model being so difficult to use in practice that the utility gained is, in most cases, very small. Too small to bother with.
    • Along with that idea, I’d love to see a trust visualization that could visualize your key in the Web of Trust and predict / recommend to whom you should establish a connection in order to increase the overall trust level of your own keys. It’s not possible, because trust isn’t an overall status that can be calculated–every person makes the own decisions about who to trust and to what degree. 😛

    Gorman, G. (2015, February 26). Interviews with the trolls: ‘We go after women because they are easier to hurt’. News.com.au. https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/interviews-with-the-trolls-we-go-after-women-because-they-are-easier-to-hurt/news-story/c02bb2a5f8d7247d3fdd9aabe0f3ad26

    • Honestly, this entire article just made me mad. Like, really mad. I generally have a fairly mild outlook on the entire human race–sometimes negative, but usually tending towards a mean somewhere just on the mildly positive side of the scale. Trolls, however, drive me crazy. Words and reactions are pointless when dealing with a troll–as the interview makes clear, it’s the reactions that the trolls are seeking!
    • And yet brushing off a troll is no longer enough. They move on to SWATting or other creepy behaviors, seeking that reaction, trying to do everything they can to make you break and give them that sweet, sweet sensation of being in control and having power over another person. There’s only one way to deal with such a cancer, and that is to erase it.
    • This also happens in communities, when you have an individual who is ostensibly a member of the group, and yet whose goal is to get reactions. It may start with their focus being mostly turned to other groups, but eventually it turns inward to the other members of the community who they believe aren’t giving them their fair recognition (because they disapprove of the behaviors being exhibited). It becomes a cancer in the community, and there’s really no recourse to it other than eviction of such an individual.
    • Sadly, matters are quickly compounded because such an individual will quickly turn other members of the community against the purported “decision-makers” and “elites” who actually implemented and effectuated the decision of the community’s majority. Second chances are begged, then third and fourth chances. And in the end, all that is accomplished is more people being hurt, including those attempting to protect the community by excising the problem.
    • There is no class of people that I hate–actually hate–more than the trolls.

    Dron, J., and Anderson, T. (2014, March 21). Agoraphobia and the modern learner. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2014(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/2014-03

    • If an open environment in learning exposes us to a continuum of opportunity and threats, this strikes me as not unlike the continuum of love and pain. To open yourself to loving somebody is to simultaneously open yourself to experiencing pain because of that love–whether the pain of loss, or betrayal, or just a bad argument. The common factor in both of these continuums is vulnerability. It is vulnerability–openness–that enables greater positives, but also greater negatives. But without an open mind, we learn nothing.
    • I quibble with the statement that safety is a prerequisite for survival. I would probably personally go back to a model such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs–survival is usually one of our first goals! Safety is a condition that allows us to move our minds off the necessity of ensuring survival and move up the pyramid. In that sense, I would consider that safety is essentially a precondition to enabling “higher” learning (anything beyond the lessons of hard-knock school).
    • I certainly don’t necessarily expect safety within a group. A group, after all, does have those formalized inclusion requirements, and “rituals of entry or exit.” What this most often means to me personally, is that I am now part of a group which I may not be able to leave voluntarily (without sacrifice), and am now therefore trapped with others who may turn on me and either attempt to torment or otherwise socially shun me. Within a group, I will always stand out, whether by choice or by chance. My unique perspective or approach to things often means that I may unwittingly breach (or never even notice) expected norms of conduct among the group’s members. But what a group does offer is the hierarchy. Any hierarchy must have rules of some form or another, and if I can learn those rules, I have something I can navigate and authorities to whom I can appeal for assistance in learning or guidance or accomplishing a task.
    • Conversely, I feel much safer in the linkages of the network. I know whom I can approach for each contextual matter, but I can observe everything. My upbringing was such that the concept of context was drilled into me as a bedrock foundation; information cannot be shared across a context (network) boundary unless either permission is given, or the given network has recognizably altered to include a new participant (usually including tacit permission being given by the originator of the information at issue). Therefore, I can observe and integrate information from all networks in which I participate, but my exploration of individual topics must remain closeted to the network from which they originated. If topics can be discussed in an alternate network, the source of any information must be anonymized or disguised. Therefore I have less concern about my personal safety in these environments, because my default stance is to prevent information leakage and (somewhat) rigorously compartmentalize any information which is shared in any given network.
    • Interestingly, I don’t trust to the anonymity of a set, except when I am in a read-only role. If I move into a read-write (or inquiring) role, then I am already committing to converting a set into a network by making some form of interpersonal connection, however fleeting or ephemeral. I would argue that it is misleading to expect any sort of anonymity in a set if you choose to post anything to which people can respond and thereby complete a social connection. (One-way posts to give out information without allowing response cannot complete a social connection and thereby allows one to maintain membership in a set without conversion into a network.) Without true anonymity (as a potential target) and without the more developed connections people seek to cultivate within a network (before raising sensitive topics), of course trolls and other miscreants become more of a problem!
    • The emergent behavior of a collective is only useful insofar as it actually reflects the behavior of the collective. If a corporation puts a thumb on the output of the recommendation engine, the recommendation is no longer the product of the collective, even if the output is indistinguishable in appearance from the actual output of the collective. In that fashion, business interests are actively incentivized to sabotage the learning that could result from examining the collective’s output.
    • The Landing’s “circles” are very reminiscent of LiveJournal’s friends groups, and function in much the same way–allowing selective disclosure on an item-level basis. But the Landing was also incredibly more complicated than LiveJournal by its very nature. LJ was about your journal, first and foremost. You could join a group, certainly! You could have a list of friends, of people who had friended you, include yourself in various sets by adding interest-based tags to your profile… all of these things, and yet the site was primarily about the journal. The content that was shared in groups were journal entries of the group’s members, directed specifically to the group. By contrast, the Landing is… well, what is it not? It’s a wiki, it’s a profile page, it’s group forums for classes, it’s a “notebook” with ancient information from 2000 that we’re supposed to study as “state-of-the-art,” it’s subgroups of groups for specific terms of a specific class… it’s everything everywhere all at once, and that’s too much.

      (I am digressing here, but I find I prefer Moodle or Brightspace specifically because it’s more structured. Flexibility is a good thing, but I would suggest that there needs to be some sort of commonality of purpose or presentation to form a structure that can then be fleshed out by the learners. I also acknowledge that I have not had a lot of experience with the Landing, and it’s possible that I may have been able to adapt to it if I had more years to do so. But… if it takes years to be able to understand and work within a single website…)

  • Week 5 Reflections

    This week was somewhat easier in terms of familiarity with the subject material–COMP683 was just last term, so the subject of analytics is still very fresh in my mind. I’m not sure if I’ve understood the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic purposes correctly, but in my mind, “intrinsic analytics” are how the system knows what it needs to do its job, while “extrinsic analytics” are how we learn about how the system is being used and how it could be further usefully modified.

    I’ve always liked thinking about how humans run their own algorithms. To me, it’s all about patterns. Sometimes, those patterns can comfort us or provide a template for how to deal with unfamiliar situations. Sometimes, those patterns can be subverted to make a point or trigger deeper examination. With different starting conditions and varied inputs during execution, different patterns of behavior are selected. People hate being compared to a machine that acts by rote, but the truth is that we all have our habits and a general “common sense” understanding of how we should comport ourselves. (I note that “common sense” is neither common nor especially sensible! A lot of it depends on your social position in life, your physical community, and the particular situation at hand. People in the same physical place, but in a different situation or with a different background, may always have a different “common sense” than us, but it is no less valid because of it!)

    I had not encountered the term “Matthew effect,” but I am of course familiar with various bandwagon effects. For example, in a busy registration line at a conference! One of the most important things to do to ensure a good experience for the attendees is to minimize the line. One solid way to do this is to actually secretly open some hours in advance of the public time, in order to get people registered as soon as they start trying to line up. If people see a line forming, their first instinct is “Oh, I should grab a place in the line now or I’ll have to wait longer later!” With that, the more people line up, the more people will keep lining up, and suddenly you have a registration line that is six hours long. Instead, if you process people immediately, everybody passing by sees a minimal line. They don’t feel the need to line up in fear of encountering a longer wait time later, and thus a lineup can be kept manageable and quick to process, and everybody has a much better experience overall.

    And that’s an example of a human algorithm. Understanding how people in general tend to behave allows us to design systems to take advantage of (or stymie) those behaviors. It’s not perfect, being based on probability, but on balance it’s incredibly useful.

    In fact, that was one of my biggest insights this week. As much as we might blame “the machine” for constructing echo chambers and filter bubbles around us… we humans are probably just as much to blame, simply by selecting options that are comfortable versus more challenging. I can’t fault us for that, but it’s important to note that even if we built a perfectly unbiased Web, our own human behavior might reconstruct the echo chambers around us. In that respect, then, perhaps we do need to construct our systems with a little bit of bias–to help us push outward and continue challenging ourselves! That wouldn’t be to maximize engagement, necessarily; it would have to be built for a different set of rationales altogether.

    As a final aside in this reflection, I suppose it’s reasonable to note that I wish I had more time in the week. There’s so much I want to read but simply do not have time for… And I feel bad, because there’s a huge list and even if I only select the items I’m keenest on reading, I still don’t have enough time to read them all to the depth I want. It’s quite frustrating, even disappointing.

  • Week 5: Analyzing Social Systems (part 3)

    For this one, I needed to do a bit of a social network map. I did this by hand, and will continue referring to it below.

    This is an egocentric map, as that’s a projection that makes the most sense to me for this example. “Strength” of the relationship (as assessed by me) is measured by the type of line, moving from a solid line for the strongest connections, through a dashed line, to a dotted line for the weakest connections. Connections between nodes other than the central node are assessed by observation and supposition; I haven’t taken a poll of anybody on this! Link reciprocity is not directly assessed or indicated here.

    In a general sense of speaking, most of the people in my house are located in the lower-left corner, with immediate biological family in the mid-left. Friends and family in the Seattle area are located in the lower-right corner, with some crossover in the lower middle created by long mutual involvement in a non-profit. (There is one exception–the placement of the node labelled “F” on the lower-to-middle right was an oversight, and it should be more correctly clustered with other nodes on the lower-left!)

    The upper-right section is a very partial graph of connections into my workplace, and the upper-left holds two connections to good friends online who are not otherwise connected to other nodes on the graph.

    One of the first things to stand out to me is the fact that most of the connections I have drawn to myself are considered to be highly or moderately strong. On reflection, this does make sense–these are the connections most likely to stand out and therefore most likely to be drawn (except where the receiving nodes are already drawn into the graph, in which case adding a link is of trivial effort).

    Another point that is relatively clear to be seen is that there is a fair amount of crossover between two otherwise-distinct clusters–a house in Vancouver and a house in Seattle. While those clusters were drawn using physical location as an organizing principle, the friendships created over a mutual interest and activity have created many links between these two locations in social space.

    Conversely, my biological family, workplace, and notable Internet-only connections have no connections between each other or to the other groups. This reflects definite intention on my part, as some of these areas of life are deliberately kept partitioned from each other. (In the case of the Internet-only connections, this is actually less intention and more simply a case of circumstance, but the effect, as with the others, is to have them partitioned away from everything else in the network nearly completely.)

    In every direction, the graph could certainly be extended, with direct relationships growing weaker and more remote as I went. (My workplace alone would probably double the size of the overall graph.) I expect that, even as these groups continued to grow and display more interconnections with each other, the partitioned groups would stay partitioned, and the connected groups would grow ever more so.

  • Week 5: Analyzing Social Systems (part 2)

    Bluesky purports to offer algorithmic choice to its users. Some of the design outlined mentioned by Graber (2023) includes treating algorithms as general aggregator services, allowing the user to swap between aggregators (or indeed, creating an aggregation of aggregators!) at will. Graber also notes correctly that even a simple “just the posts of people I follow, in chronological order” is itself an algorithm.

    This is far from the only algorithm available, however. Slachmuijlder (2024) notes that Bluesky also offers algorithms such as “Popular with Friends,” “Science,” “Blacksky,” and “Quiet Posters.” These algorithms are all quite different.

    “Popular with Friends” showcases popular content from the people you follow and the people they follow. This relies on signals such as likes–the more liked a post is, the stronger the signal of “popularity.” This is limited to two levels of follows–your direct follows, and their follows–so that you aren’t simply browsing the most popular content on the entire service.

    “Science” is “a curated feed from Bluesky professional scientists, science communicators, and science/nature photographer/artists.” This therefore is less a machine algorithm and much more of a human algorithm in operation, relying on the judgement of the curator(s) to determine posts which “fit” the category.

    “Blacksky” is a feed for showcasing black voices. This is poster-determined, as using a specific hashtag can either include a single post into the feed or add the poster into the feed permanently. (Manual removal of posts or posters is available if necessary to clean up the feed.)

    “Quiet Posters” includes posts from people who follow you who don’t post often, ensuring that infrequent posts aren’t drowned out in a large or busy feed.

    The ability for users to select their own algorithms, or indeed choose several of them (if science is an interest, why not include Science as one of the options, as well as something which looks more directly at your own follows and followers?) is a powerful feature. The feedback loops in operation are different for each of these algorithms, but the user is not locked into any of them.

    A feed such as Blacksky, which can be manipulated by simply adding the appropriate hashtag to a post, is simple to join to make content more visible. This ease of use also makes it relatively easy to abuse, particularly as removal of a post or poster from the feed is a manual affair. Perhaps to some extent (and I am theorizing heavily here!) this is a risk that is judged acceptable to some marginalized communities–the risk of a non-marginalized poster voluntarily marking themself as marginalized is comparatively low, versus the risk that an automated method of removing marginalized posters from the feed could be abused by non-marginalized viewers. The algorithm’s design in this case could be understood to offer maximal ease of inclusion and minimal risk of being unfairly removed by abuse of automation.

    “Popular with Friends” seems more vulnerable to persistent abuse, however. As this is based on how “popular” a post is, any automated influence operation that artificially inflates a post’s like count could drive up a post’s visibility in the feed. This is somewhat mitigated by the limitation to any single user’s immediate follows and their follows. Still, for a user with an expansive social network, this might still be something of a concern.

    The largest risk I can see with Blacksky’s function is what I highlighted earlier–a risk of external hijacking of the feed, by external actors adding the required tags to automatically include themselves and then broadcast to everybody using that algorithm. The design of manual intervention being required to reverse that is the corresponding weakness (even though good reasons may exist for that design decision). If I were to design a modification to this, I would seek to incorporate signals from the users of the feed. If a significant proportion of the feed’s subscribers were to block or otherwise downvote a given post, the feed might respond to this signal by deprioritizing or hiding that post. Of course, this also creates a weakness of external actors subscribing to the feed in sufficient numbers to block any target post they choose. For marginalized communities, this may be perceived as a much bigger risk than the risk of the occasional broadcast from inappropriate sources (until manual intervention arrives). A refinement of my modification might also gate the accounts whose blocking signals are counted, such that users who have only recently subscribed to the feed cannot influence automated moderation, with various cutoffs (such as a week or a month) available to be tested and selected as necessary to make the feed more or less resilient to exploitation in response to changing conditions.

    In a similar fashion, Popular with Friends could possibly be adjusted to only include like signals from an account’s own follows. The limitation in only showing popular content for direct follows and their follows is probably acceptable, as this allows for exploration of content that is not directly connected, but nearly directly connected to the user. Even so, only counting like signals from direct follows would make external influence operations nearly useless. Further adjustment could weight like signals more heavily if the target poster is not a direct follow. A direct follow has more chance of being part of the same immediate circle, and may therefore be more likely to receive more likes among that circle than a user who is only indirectly connected into the circle. Thus, amplification of these weaker “at-a-distance” like signals may be appropriate to compensate for the expected lower possible volume of likes from direct follows.

    References:

    Graber, J. (2023, March 30). Algorithmic choice. Bluesky. https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice

    Slachmuijlder, L. (2024, November 30). Bluesky lets you choose your algorithm. Tech and Social Cohesion. Substack. https://techandsocialcohesion.substack.com/p/bluesky-lets-you-choose-your-algorithm

  • Week 5: Analyzing Social Systems (part 1)

    Donath, J. (2020). 2. Visualizing Social Landscapes. In The Social Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20240817102406/https://covid-19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ljr3x1qq/release/1

    • Immediately, the discussion about visualizing social interaction online brings to mind some of the MMOs I have spent time playing in my undergraduate days! Interacting with each other’s avatar was sometimes just a silly prank (particularly where voice communication was being used outside of the game), but it was just as expressive as pranking each other in real life. Where text communication was used, it was also possible for other players to “eavesdrop” on the conversation in passing, just as if they were walking past an energetic discussion on the street.
    • Visualizations are something we dealt with quite a bit in COMP683. There’s a definite knack to selecting a good (rather than a merely adequate) visualization for each instance where one is useful.
    • Maps are a useful thing, and it is correct to say that they gain much of their utility from abstraction and simplification. I would consider legends to be a similar tool, and (at least to my mind) more applicable in a wider variety of contexts. If I am visualizing something, it is just as important to know what I am looking at, as it is to be seeing it in the first place. And just as with a map, the decision on what to highlight and how to do so is key to enabling viewer understanding.
    • An algorithmic map is also somewhat subjective in what it displays, because it encodes the subjective judgements of the algorithm’s author(s) to determine what should be abstracted and under what conditions each level of abstraction should be employed. But once the algorithm is coded, those judgements will be implemented evenly and without (further) bias. I would suggest that this is not only faster to update and run, but could also be a “fairer” map generator overall?
    • Map interactivity is a feature which enables autonomy, which means that an interactive map can help stimulate intrinsic motivation to play with and learn from it, no? Shout-out to SDT from last week!
    • The point about maps enabling asocial navigation is a good one. Wayfaring is a more romantic thought, certainly, but in practice… I prefer a map for various reasons–not least of which is not having to work to comprehend the other person’s directions. That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to avoid interacting with people entirely, however. Still, it’s a good point to keep in mind, that even something as simple as a “reference” like a map can function to change a community dramatically, such as when we shift focus to information retrieval rather than discussion.

    Donath, J. (2020). 4. Mapping Social Networks. In The Social Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20240820021904/https://covid-19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ngsi0mxz/release/1

    • I’m amused by the example of choosing who to speak to by going through a list of names versus picking a network cluster. In my LiveJournal days, I essentially had separate filters for those “rings” of closeness–close friends, good friends, acquaintances, loose ties, etc. I could (and did) also filter by interest, or by physical proximity. There was always a common thread that those filters were constructed upon, and that’s what made those filters such an intuitive tool to use.
    • It also comes to my mind that a network is precisely how I saw and understood social groups as I first entered university. I mapped out who was connected to whom, who was the common link between different groups, and who spoke with authority both within and between groups. This was something I did rather formally at the time, largely because dealing with social groups was a skill I was still learning. These days I don’t think of things quite so rigidly… but the concepts are still accurate, it seems.
    • Knowing that every map has omissions, and knowing that there are many ways people may answer a single question (such as that about “close ties”), I’m reminded that in order to understand the answer, we must first understand the question. Part of that process of understanding will always involve asking how the question was formed, for what purpose, why it was phrased as such, how it was heard, how it was perceived… there are so many factors at work. No wonder researchers must usually ask more narrowly-defined questions!
    • Back to what I said previously about mapping some of the social networks around me when I had first entered university… I wanted to know who the “authorities” were, and who connected what group… but I never actually considered that there’s more roles. I mean, I probably considered “rebroadcasting” (which could be seen as amplifying?) but beyond that… filtering of information, tuning of information (to emphasize or highlight particular parts)… there’s more things we can do with information than just stop it or rebroadcast it. Fascinating.
    • I was never on MySpace, but LiveJournal definitely encouraged connections among strangers. Part of that was because you could add interest-based tags to your own profile, and people could browse those tags… since your profile also listed your friends and people who had friended you–friendships were not necessarily reciprocal!–that was another avenue for people to find you. And, of course, then there was the content of each person’s journal, plus any additional links they had on their profile.
    • More importantly, while you could go to anybody’s journal and read their posts, you could also click the “Friends” tab and read all of their friends’ posts. This was, in fact, where I spent most of my time–I didn’t need to read my own journal, I wanted to read those of my friends! Privacy levels were integrated, so even if a friend posted something very private and I could see it on my friends page, strangers browsing my friends page could not see it.
    • In that way, the friends page offered people a public view of who the journal owner wanted to follow and read. It was an excellent way of discovering social links, but it didn’t necessarily show you everything… it was a sanitized, public view by default.
    • Comments on the journal entries could also be public or private (between the journal owner and the commenter). The comments were the other half of the conversation, and they said much in aggregate about who was reading and responding, and on what topics.

    Ardito, G. & Dron, J. (2024). The emergence of autonomy in intertwingled learning environments: a model of teaching and learning. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 241-264. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2024.2325746

    • Why on earth would anybody perceive “traditional” education to be a linear system, no matter how complex? Identical inputs will never yield prescribed or predictable outputs–the human species is not that simple. It’s all about probabilities, but even then, a successful teacher will need to consider how to address the outliers. That’s part of the whole deal!
    • I like the description of keeping the system “on the edge of chaos.” It’s the balance between enough chaos to enable further progress, and enough order to prevent the entire system from collapsing on itself.
    • This, incidentally, is also why I dislike corporations who pursue “disruption” purely. Chaos must be balanced with order. It is not enough to unmake the previous system; there must be a replacement. Those who destroy without a plan for creation are only halfway there, and 50% isn’t good enough.
    • Understanding that the graphs are quite possibly not “complete,” I’m amused by the omission of a key resource in Figure 7–the people! Not just teachers, but most importantly, the fellow students who were able to pass on their knowledge via peer mentoring! Isn’t that kind of the whole point, really? Creating an environment where your resources are not just oriented vertically in teacher-student dimension, but horizontally in student-student dimension? (And likewise in faculty-faculty interactions as well, I might add.)
    • Nobody who trains another, yet withholds the ability for them to train those who come later, has finished the job. Part of teaching any subject is enabling those who have taught to turn around and pass their knowledge on in turn. With that in mind, how blind would we have to be to believe that teacher-to-student interactions are the only interactions of value in a learning environment? Students will teach others as they go; would it not make sense to help them practice doing so effectively, as part of learning the material?

    Martin, A. (2013, May 1). The web’s ‘echo chamber’ leaves us none the wiser. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/online-stubbornness/

    • I would accept that language may not be evidence of thought, but is evidence of how we think. The structure of our thinking is encoded into the structure of our language. And in a similar sense, learning a new language and its structure will also change the structure of our thoughts.
    • What does this say about people who are fluent in (and regularly use!) more than one language? If they have learned to move seamlessly from one language to another, does this mean they hold two separate patterns of thought–or does it mean that they have constructed a hybrid of the two, different from either that came before it?
    • Now suppose someone learned the patois or pidgin language that was originally a combination of two other languages. It would follow that they have learned the hybrid patterns of thought as well, but not necessarily the methods of thought behind the predecessor languages. To them, the other two source languages may appear vaguely familiar, but also not; the same may be true of the accompanying structure of thinking.
    • What does this mean in the context of an echo chamber? It’s comforting to hear people who speak in the same “language” as you do, with the accompanying shorthands and abbreviations of concept. But it doesn’t expand your thinking or make you think critically about your own thought and how you could “translate” from one to the other by finding points of commonality and breaking down the points of difference.
    • This article also hits on two other points that I find important: the Internet makes finding similar viewpoints easy because it removes geographical boundaries, and online networks are no more of an echo-chamber than real-life social networks. Put these two together, and you could rightly suggest that the reason the Internet has facilitated the effects of an echo chamber, a filter bubble, or a more strongly-polarized culture is because of the removal of geographical boundaries. That is, when we had a geographically restricted set of people with whom we would have most interactions through our lives, that was our available network. To some extent, the necessity of interacting with people of differing viewpoints was built into this, because of the restrictions on the network. While it was possible to hold extreme views, it was more likely that each person would have to understand how to work with people of diverse perspectives, and the effect of an echo chamber was more limited because of that. When those geographic boundaries were removed, humans had more freedom to seek out interactions which were most comfortable, rather than most practical. I don’t discount the culpability of corporate interests tuning their algorithms to maximize “engagement with the machine,” but let’s not ignore our own fallibility as a species–given the opportunity, most of us would happily retreat to the comfort of people who think and speak like us. When we do not actively prioritize learning and growing outside our “native” environments, we end up constructing our own echo chambers.