Do You Really Know More From Those Online Images

A friend of mine associated me to her bike-trip images on Facebook. It wasn’t the same, viewing them alone without the stories. I really wanted her to tell me the stories. I wanted to hear her getting sucked back into that time and reliving the journey and I share it with me one on one. Perhaps web images do reveal sides of people you wouldn’t otherwise know about. My experience is that they reduce the interaction, and the barrage of exposure really imparts less information.


We are an increasingly polarized country, right? That was the premise of a book named The Big Sort; its slogan is "why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart." Writer Bill Bishop made the case that Americans are sorting themselves not just into large, broad groups such as lefties and righties, but much more particular ones. We seem to choose neighborhoods that have just the progressive, funky, artsy feel we like, or the affluent, tidy, conservative bent that feels most comfortable, or some other favored change. The blogosphere sorts itself, too, with clusters of like-minded people who chat to each other a lot but typically spend much less time on websites with very different perspectives.

I believe that polarization is real and that the web makes it easier than it used to be to find people who share our values, perspectives, life experiences, and quirks. So I was intrigued by a finding reported in a paper I discussed in my last post, by Keith Hampton and his colleagues. The authors asked about 2,151 Americans to name their confidants. The participants also reported their use of the internet and various social media, including photo sharing. Among the information they provided about themselves and their confidants were their political affiliation.

If our use of web opportunities is pushing us in just one direction toward a sorting into groups that are becoming less and less diverse then people who use social media the most should also report the most homogeneous set of confidants. But the authors found something very different. People who more often shared images online were more likely to report at least one confidant of a different political party than their own.

So are new technologies actually increasing the diversity of our core social networks? That’s not what the authors think. Instead, they suggest the possibility that when we use new media such as photo sharing, we learn things about each other that we hadn’t known before.

Think about how you interact with someone face to face. Possibly you avoid some topics that might be upsetting. Or, you just assume the other people agrees with you, and that other person never corrects you. If those kinds of interactions are the only ones you ever have with somebody, perhaps you’d never know some of the important ways in which you differ from each other.

I think some polarization is usual, there isn’t much basis for me, a free thinking, independent single, to form a friendship with somebody who goes to a minster where they rail against demonize childless females. I’m more likely to state my opinions diplomatically, but when someone comes out and says "God hates you" to my face, frankly I don’t have a lot of desire to bridge that gap. I have a realistic idea of how much I’ll be able to change that person’s heart, and no desire to accept that person’s attempt to educate me on the error of my ways. We are becoming more divided and there’s an all out culture war going on. I don’t know if there’s an answer to bring us back together.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach handbags and fashion things.