By some reports, the issue of tribalism on the internet can be traced loosely back to 2003 and the concern regarding the term itself and the far-reaching effects of the trend are both growing from a warm campfire to virtual inferno. The term “tribalism” calls to mind the images of a close-knit band gathered for communal thought, expression, and comfort as they attempt to survive. Similarly, this is precisely what the origin of “digital tribalism” feels like to we who engage in the practice.
In a strikingly prophetic 2014 article entitled “How ‘Digital Tribalism’ is Changing Social Media”, Craig Brews, peers eerily into his crystal ball (or mirror depending upon your personal view) in stating, “Early predictions of the internet were that it would make us all homogenous but the ‘Rise of the Tribes’ will actually create a more decentralized and personal user experience.” The truth in the prediction is difficult to escape. Once the collective eyes of the world were opened by the exponential increase in global communication brought about by the internet as a whole, the messages of others were within reach in seconds and the variety was staggering. The following of dramatic advances in user-friendly applications to allow for simplistic methods of communicating whatever message one should wish empowered and emboldened the common world citizen to sit equally around the global campfire as a storyteller of their own design. Equal amongst the rest, all stories seemed to hold merit.
It may be difficult to recall the relative difficulties involved in establishing a presence upon the World Wide Web and delivering a message for an individual. The technological complexities made it exclusive to a degree. The quality of websites and their accessibility served as an indicator of validity in the same way that seeing a hand-drawn and misspelled sign for roadside medicine likely keeps our respective feet on the gas pedal and head shaking as we passed along on our way in search of healing.
However, as social media platforms emerged and the areas of expression suddenly felt the same, it became difficult to discern these “tells” toward validity and the most skillfully-crafted and well-researched pieces of journalism appeared almost identical in visual quality to a hastily thrown-together slice of lunacy. All of the storytellers around our global campfire now had microphones, stage lighting, and special effects. Our human propensity to gravitate toward the entertaining and dramatic led us to follow the most sensational stories and the greatest showmen whilst ignoring our own apprehensions that their truths may not always be that truthful.
Jamie Bartlett, author of both “The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld” and his new book “Radicals” said, “The biggest danger in society is self-censorship.” Bartlett contends that there is a lack of global critique from the philosophical and moral rebels amongst us and that we truly need the “crazy people” to make advancement as a society. Clearly, it is not for lack of opportunity that these social critics are silenced. The ability to broadcast a viewpoint from a handheld device in the span of an hour is truly staggering when viewed with a historical perspective. Had Mark Twain a Twitter account, what volumes of width would the world potentially have at its disposal? But, the issue must be viewed from the opposite plate of the scale as well. How many subscribers would Senator McCarthy’s YouTube channel have collected? In the same LondonREAL interview, Bartlett says, “It terrifies me. It’s not that people are going to be sent to prison for saying the wrong thing. Nobody dares speak out.” It is, perhaps, not the fear that there are not enough voices that should concern us. It seems that a greater concern might be that we have lost our ability to well discern the credible from the cracked. This phenomenon is made exponentially more dire by the expanding capability to control exactly to what media each individual is exposed. With the vast amount of available views and content the issue of confirmation bias has helped to create pockets of self-indulgence deemed “echo chambers” within social media usage.
Confirmation bias is nothing new and is a close relative to a type of logical fallacy called a Fallacy of Selective Attention and is more appropriately called a “cognitive bias”. Simply stated, this practice is the equivalent of placing the hands over the ears and chanting, “La la la la” loudly enough to drown out any information that challenges one’s own. Controls such as “unfriending”, muting, blocking, or simply never selecting a stream of information that contradicts our own view is creating a false worldview for many individuals.
A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Quattrociocchi, Scala, and Sunstein expresses in measurable quantities the degrees to which users promote their polarized groups and narratives while simultaneously blocking and deleting any contradictory viewpoints or information. Those monitored were 376 million Facebook users between January of 2010 and December 2015 accessing 920 various news outlets. The 2016 study coined the term “echo chambers” to define the artificially constructed areas within an individual’s social media presence wherein their own circle of friends, feeds, and memes do nothing but support their own views. This results in a homogenized view of exactly how correct these views may actually be in reality. The study exposes the extent of these individuals efforts that went so far as to aggressively reject information deliberately inserted by the examiners that debunked patently false information while other deliberately inserted falsehoods were uniformly and enthusiastically accepted by the “tribes” within the study pool.
Were it not for the reality of the rapidly expanding acceptance of social media as a source of reliable information, this might simply be filed in the category of commonplace human behavior. Mark Zuckerberg told Wired in 2014 about the oncoming trend when he said that in the upcoming, “…five year period, people will start thinking about social networks not as communications tools, but also knowledge tools.” People want to belong and they want to feel safe. If shunned at one campfire they will search for another where they are welcomed and given warmth. We assimilate the customs and cultures we need to survive. In our self-selected tribes whose membership can be terminated with a click, if we want the warmth of the fire and sustenance it provides, must we listen to all the stories told without question? In vulnerable times how many have the strength to question the tales of their tribe and walk away into the wilderness by choosing to forage for their own truth?
Should that be your intent, Quattrociocchi supports your effort and commits that understanding one’s own bias is the first and only real step toward self-sufficiency. Or, by all means, stay in the warm tub with all of your tribe and sip heartily at the communal bathwater. Eventually it will foul but for now you’ll be safe and the water’s fine.