I recently finished a paper about blogs as echo chambers. Our project was heavily influenced by various books by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago: InfoTopia, Republic.com and Why Societies Need Dissent. We were siting around in social seminar, and Karrie said, “it seems like most blogs are just echo chambers—everyone always agrees.” I said, “let’s see if we can prove it.” We hand-coded over 1,000 blog comments and wrote a paper on the project. It’s currently in submission, so I won’t post it; I’ll just include the abstract for now.

Abstract
In the last decade, blogs have exploded in number, popularity and scope. However, many commentators and researchers speculate that blogs isolate readers in echo chambers, cutting them off from dissenting opinions. Our empirical paper tests this hypothesis. Using a hand-coded sample of over 1,000 comments from 33 of the world’s top blogs, we find that agreement outnumbers disagreement in blog comments by more than 3 to 1. However, this ratio depends heavily on a blog’s genre, varying between 2 to 1 and 9 to 1. Using these hand-coded blog comments as input, we also show that natural language processing techniques can identify the linguistic markers of agreement. We conclude by applying our empirical and algorithmic findings to practical implications for blogs, and discuss the many questions raised by our work.

image courtesy of the Illinois state highway system

The Network in the Garden: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural Life.
Proc. CHI, 2008.

Abstract
History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet, we know little about how rural communities use modern technologies, so we lack knowledge on how to design for them. To address this gap, our empirical paper investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. Using a dataset collected from a broadly popular social network site, we analyze users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Using social capital theory, we predict differences between rural and urban users and find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses. Namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Our results also indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. We conclude by discussing design implications drawn from our findings; most importantly, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust-building.

Full paper as PDF

P.S. I am very happy to announce this paper—I’m especially proud of this work. And, yes, I reused the state highway sign from an earlier post. I love it!

Update (Apr 14): I just learned that danah boyd included this paper in her bibliography of research on social network sites. Thanks, danah!