Digg: an echo chamber for a few?

One of the charges against social news sites is that they are only seemingly democratic, while in reality they are only used to air the views of the few, most active members of the community. Research conducted by the Wall Street Journal indicated that, indeed, a very small portion of the community members is responsible for the majority of submitted items.

Here is what I found on Digg, focusing on articles that became a.) popular (voted to the front page by the community) and b.) dealing with the (pre-)election campaign in the US.

AR; About social cues in online discussion

Continuing the series of reviews about JCMC articles, let’s look at something so far uncovered here: how various social markers – cues – influence online, computer-mediated communication (CMC).

The article in question has been written by Tan, Swee, Lim, Detenber and Alsagoff, under the title “The Impact of Language Variety and Expertise on Perceptions of Online Political Discussions.” It’s available here.

The idea was to measure in a carefully controlled survey how various status markers – explicit or implicit – influence perceptions of a discussant’s informativeness, persuasiveness, appeal for participation and credibility. To cut a long story short: THEY DON’T. Or not really, anyway.

The results of this study suggest that language and expertise cues in a CMC context do not have quite the impact that was anticipated. In fact, the effects were very limited. Specifically, the status markers of language and expertise did not influence perceptions of a discussant’s informativeness or persuasiveness. [...] It appears that how one “speaks” or writes is more influential than the degree of competence ascribed to individuals by various structural features of the website.

What I call “explicit” cues are, for example: the rank and rating of a user on a discussion forum (“novice” with 1 star, etc.), the indicated time when the user joined the forum, and the number of posts the user contributed. The main implicit cue in this study was the use of language (i.e. what kind of language variety the user chose to write an entry on the forum).

Participants of the survey were asked to read carefully designed forum posts, and to rate how they perceived their informativenss, persuasiveness, appeal for participation and credibility; and rate they did, refuting the starting hypotheses that had predicted a detectable influence from various social cues on the perception of the posts.

The authors note that there is still a lot to be explored on the field of social cues and CMC; what seems to be sure is that the mental processing of cues in CMC is different from that in face-to-face contexts. It might be that in CMC, a sequential processing of heuristic cues applies: some cues are more visible than others, and thus the effects of these cues might override the effects of less visible cues. For example, explicit markers of experience and expertise (rank, number of posts etc.) are processed first, and the more implicit language cues are interpreted in the light of these former. Expertise is linked to experience: thus, if you have a high rank, and a large number of posts on a message board, you might more easily be perceived as an expert, which is likely to override the implicit cues in the language you actually use in a post…

…BUT, then, the main point of the study is that AFTER ALL it’s no the cues that matter, but the content of utterances.

Which is, from the point of view of deliberative democracy, quite encouraging. However, as the authors themselves point out, more research is needed to confirm this claim, especially when it comes to different contexts, topics – and discussions forums.

AR; some more thoughts on online news credibility

Returning to the issue of credibility, here’s another article from the JCMC, by William P. Cassidy, with the title “Online News Credibility: An Examination of the Perception of Newspaper Journalists.”

Taking advantage of a sociology of news framework, Cassidy surveyed how online and offline journalists viewed “Internet news information”. The answer: it is viewed as “moderately credible.” Here, credibility was defined as a 4-dimensional construct, comprising fairness, believability, accuracy and comprehensiveness. Respondents were asked to rate these factors on a 7-point Likert-type scale (eg. 1 = not at all fair, 7 = extremely fair). Scores were summed up, and thus “Internet news information” in general received a credibility index of 17.15 (on a scale thus ranging from 4 to 28).

In addition, online journalists rated the credibility of online news sources significantly higher (19.05) than journalists who mostly work for the print media (16.57); and the moderate credibility score points, according to Cassidy, to a growing acceptance of the net as a credible information source among professional journalists. The article also cites detailed statistics on how demographical and other factors correlate with the respondents’ perception of credibility, which, if you’re conducting research into this field, you might find interesting.

I, for one, can only think of the point with which I concluded the previous entry on this blog. For about two years, I could officially consider myself as a journalist, having worked for the Budapest Business Journal and the Hungarian edition of the American Entrepreneur magazine. I was wondering how I would have rated “Internet news sources”, had I been asked by Cassidy. I would have given 4 points out of 7 to all the factors, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with any kind of qualifying statement about these news sources; because I don’t believe that the hugely varied and extremely large multitude of online sources could be meaningfully represented by a single number on a scale. Had he asked me about specific sources, the answer would have been quite different.

AR: [...] why war opponents perceived the internet as the most credible medium

The authors: Junho H. Choi, James H. Watt and Michael Lynch; the publisher: JCMC, the full title: “Perceptions of News Credibility about the War in Iraq: Why War Opponents Perceived the Internet as the Most Credible Medium”.

Choi, Watt and Lynch surveyed how bearers of different opinions about the Iraq war (“supporters,” “neutrals” and “opponents”) perceived various media’s credibility. Apparently, those opposing the war relied more heavily on the internet to gather news than war supporters and neutrals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, opponents also saw that the internet – in general – questioned the war-supporting attitude of mainstream, conventional media. War opponents also rated the internet more credible than did war supporters and neutrals.

In other words,

the internet was viewed as an alternative channel by those who could not otherwise get news or information from traditional media that accorded with their political attitudes towards the war in Iraq.

The authors also tried to explore the notion of credibility – and what it could mean in online settings. Participants of the survey were asked to rank various media types according to their perceived credibility, and also to define what “credibility” means for them. I think this is the most interesting part of the study.

The hunger for scoops

In this article Dainel Okrent, the public editor (readers’ representative) of The New York Times analyzes how the venerable newspaper could, for a long time, present flawed coverage of the alleged weapons of mass destruction Iraq was supposed to have in 2003. Importantly, Okrent emphasizes the role of the editors here (as opposed to the field journalists), and lists arguments such as the hunger for scoops and the “front-page syndrome.”

I find it ironic that the link originally was posted in a comment to an item by Andrew Keen, once again throwing (this time in support of yet another piece) some generalizing punches towards the internet, or rather its unreliability and uncertainty.

What I did in the summer

I just couldn’t resist the temptation on this one title! Anyhow, I’m back in front of a computer and more or less reliable internet connection, after a short break from all this. This is a recap mostly for myself to see what I did, what I’m doing, what I should (…and all sorts of other auxiliary verbs) be doing.

If you’re REALLY interested, this way  –>.