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David Lazer
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Ben Waber
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Maria Binz-Scharf
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Alexander Schellong
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Recent Entries
- Final thoughts for now on the Coburn attacks on the online townhall report
- Following the digital breadcrumbs...
- Network picture of attacks on online townhall report
- Papers on online deliberative field experiments
- Online Townhall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century.
- Report on online townhalls...
- Responsive Buildings and Social Networks
Recent Comments
- Re: Network picture of attacks on online townhall report
By: furious
Date: Nov 5, 2009 2:54 PM - Re: Network picture of attacks on online townhall report
By: David Allen
Date: Nov 4, 2009 9:36 AM - Re: Network picture of attacks on online townhall report
By: Scott W. Somerville
Date: Nov 4, 2009 8:36 AM
Notification
« Papers on online deliberative field experiments | Main | Following the digital breadcrumbs... »
1 November 2009
Network picture of attacks on online townhall report
Readers of this blog will know that last week I summarized an NSF and Harvard funded report on which I was lead author on online townhalls. Our findings included: if a Member of Congress reaches out to constituents in an online forum, it will reach people who tend not to participate in politics, and especially individuals who are frustrated with the political system, it will affect those constituents' views of the Member and increase their policy knowledge and political engagement. Well, this was picked up on by Senator Tom Coburn (who is trying to defund the Political Science program in NSF) last Wednesday who hammered the report as a waste of taxpayer money. A flyer his staff passed out at a briefing we conducted to Congressional staff on Friday captures the spirit of the critique:
(would be interested in the provenance of the picture, in case any readers know)
At the moment I will not address the merits of the criticisms, but focus instead on the interesting diffusion process that followed from the initial criticism from Coburn. Each day it was picked up by another few blogs. A quote from John Stossel provides a sense of the tone of the postings: "This summer's town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether." Initially, I would infer, the first few blogs must have been on some distribution list from Coburn's office (i.e., they weren't just watching his website) because there were quotations from materials from Coburn that were not on his website. Thereafter you could see how different blogs picked up on the story, typically quoting or copying from another blog. So what one sees is a signal propagation process through the blogs. And as the signal propagates it evolves. Thus, for example, Stossel quotes from the Heritage blog, but then adds his distinct emphasis. The link and copying structure reflects the attention each blogger is paying to other blogs, however one would guess that each blog has a different but overlapping audience. Here is a picture of the diffusion process to date:
Node colors correspond to dates (28: white, 29: light gray, 30: dark gray). Time flows left to right, where the variations within each day reflect publication time of day, but only in an "eyeballing" sense. Link weights are encoded white: explicit mention, black: shared text, grey: both. Arrows point from destination node to source
What one cannot see, but is certainly reflected here somehow is that there is an interpersonal network among these bloggers (and relevant nonbloggers). However, this micro case study does suggest ways that one might disentangle the informational ecosystem among blogs, by looking at shared text, link structure, and to look at it dynamically and by content. If you know of interesting papers along these lines, please feel free to post in comments. One relevant, freshly minted paper, is:
Posted by David Lazer at November 1, 2009 7:02 PM
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Comments
That handout is hilarious! Makes a pretty compelling comparison.
Posted by: Kelly Robinson at November 2, 2009 10:55 PM
David, your post is remarkable.
To pick up the Neanderthals, in their lairs, and use the tools to reveal their coziness - too much, too fine!
David
Posted by: David Allen at November 3, 2009 2:17 AM
Since you asked about relevant papers:
One extremely relevant paper studying exactly this:
Gruhl, Guha, Liben-Nowell, Tomkins: Information Diffusion through Blogpsace.
Posted by: David Kempe at November 3, 2009 9:14 PM
"And we have another scoop: our analysis of all available data leads us to conclude that we have discovered a new law of physics - something called 'gravity'...."
Posted by: Jum Jum 
at November 3, 2009 11:13 PM
That's some really sharp analysis there, David. One might even say "sharp as a laser". Wink.
Now, of course, I assume your next little network diagram project will show us the interconnections between, lets say, Pelosi's office, the White House blog, OFA, Kos, Media Matters, Huffington Post, MSNBC, NBC/ABC/CBS, the New York Times, Washington Post, Code Pink, etc. etc.
Come to think of it, you may need to buy a better diagramming tool to get all those relationships in.
Looking forward to your next installment.
Posted by: Texas Pete at November 4, 2009 12:09 AM
Goodness gracious! This must mean bloggers and other content providers are somehow interconnected. Next thing you know, they'll have feeds for subscriptions much like the one on this site to inform others about new content. Dastardly.
Are you sure that Coburn et al. were making attacks on the report (per your title of this post) and not raising protests about profligate expenditures by the Congress using a pretty good example?
Posted by: James Bradley at November 4, 2009 12:54 AM
You mean like bloggers link to each other and stuff? Wow, groundbreaking. Welcome to 2004. Did it really take you this long to figure this out?
Posted by: MJ at November 4, 2009 7:06 AM
The new science of artificial "neural networks" suggests that one can model the blogosphere (or any human community) as a neural network. Each blogger has a set of regular inputs (like the dendrites on a neuron) and a single output (like the axon). "Learning" occurs as synapses form and/or break between dendrites and neurons (and/or strengthen and weaken), with the "intelligence" of the system emerging as a result of interconnected nodes.
There's no real question whether the blogosphere (and other networks of communicators, such as the traditional media) is a neural network--the more interesting question is "how intelligent is it?"
That turns out to be a remarkably easy question to explore. Politics divides the blogosphere neatly into left and right sides, and both sides of the blogosphere are constantly making predictions. Those predictions get tested every election cycle. That means researchers should be able to (1) map out the general structure of the neural network on both sides, (2) collect pre-election predictions, (3) compare those to public opinion polls (as a "baseline"), and (4) compare the "spread" between predictions and polls to the actual results.
A neural network built around the axis of the DailyKos/DemocraticUnderground/FireDogLake blogs might be more "intelligent" than the competing net that includes Drudge/Instapundit/RedState, or it might not. As a matter of pure science, I'd love to know which is better.
And, as a political junkie, I'd love to add all the "intelligence" I can find to my own side!
Posted by: Scott W. Somerville at November 4, 2009 8:36 AM
Glad to see some 'intelligence' return to this thread, with the last post ...
David
Posted by: David Allen at November 4, 2009 9:36 AM
James Bradley: I believe it's called "the Interwebs". Harvard is catching up to that, as well.
Quoting Don Surber: Heaven help us if Harvard ever discovers Twitter.
Posted by: furious at November 5, 2009 2:54 PM