TED Talk: Global Voices

I'll frame this post around a personal example illustrating part of Zuckerman's main point.  I am a member of a community at reddit.com.  Reddit (read it...get it?) is a social news aggregator where users can post news stories from around the world.  Users can upvote or downvote articles, and the more recent and interesting articles make their way to the top.  The site can be browsed by sub-reddits.  These are arranged by interest: international news, technology, bicycling, crochet, and even funny pictures of cats with captions underneath.

reddit's mascot

When I discovered this site, I started reading the comment threads and I found that there were a lot of different types of users on the site.  Many were engineers, there were professors from around the world, fry cooks, all types.  When I get on the Internet without a particular focus and I want to find some new and interesting information, I start from reddit.

Over time, I found that a lot of the same links and themes were repeated.  I took another look at the user base and found that although there were some users in outlier demographics, most users were just like me: educated white males in their 20s, English-speaking, and mostly living in America.  My views were the same as most of the views I heard repeated over and over.  I realized that what I liked about reddit was that for the most part, the "hive mind" conformed with my views and I was continually receiving support for my biases.



tl;dr: I thought I was in a worldwide information sharing community and learning lots of new things, but it turned out I was just perpetuating my own biases.