About Those Photos Shared Online: Do They Tell Us More Than We Used to Know About Each Other?

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

I believe that polarization is real and that the internet 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 2,152 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 was their political affiliation.

If our use of online 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 photos 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 people face-to-face (or by phone). Probably you avoid certain topics that might be troublesome. Or, you just assume the other person agrees with you, and that other person never corrects you. If those sorts of interactions are the only ones you ever have with someone (and, once upon a time, they were the only ones), maybe you'd never know some of the significant ways in which you differ from each other.

Now there's photo-sharing. The person posting the photos is not posting them for your eyes only. So the "impression management" isn't tailored specifically to you. Of course, what you can learn about other people this way can go way beyond political affiliation.

So what do you think? Has the online world revealed more than you would have known otherwise about the people you thought you already knew?

Reference:
Hampton, K. N., Sessions, L. F., & Ja Her, E. (in press). Core networks, social isolation, and new media: Internet and mobile phone use, network size, and diversity. Information, Communication, & Society.

[There are so many interesting asides in this paper that I still haven't discussed the main point - that contrary to the scare stories, we are probably not becoming more isolated than we were before. Maybe we have just as many people in our lives who are important to us, but some of them are significant in more specialized ways than they were in the past.]