For the past few days I've been deep into thinking and learning about homophily, our tendency to connect to people who share similar backgrounds, experiences, interests and values. I've been excited to see a conversation beginning to occur both here in comments and at other blogs. It's interesting to see the conversations evolve and new pieces being added to the puzzle.
As I continue my reading, discussions and thinking, I've delved into some concepts I haven't visited for awhile, most particularly the nature of networks and two types of behaviors that occur to build them--bonding and bridging activities. I think that these offer additional ways to think about the issue of homophily and give us some strategies for creating a better balance for healthier network growth.
Adaptive Networks and the Role of Bonding and Bridging Activities
If you believe in the value of networked learning, it's because you've observed that there's value in the social capital that we develop through our participation in networks. In other words, we benefit from our connections to the people in our network.
However, as Lenore Newman and Ann Dale observe in their paper on Network Structure, Diversity and Proactive Resilience Building, not all social networks are created equal:
". . . networks composed of "bridging" links to a diverse web of resources strengthen a community's ability to adapt to change, but networks composed only of local "bonding" links which compose constraining social norms and foster group homophily can reduce resilience."
This paper raises a couple of issues for me--the idea of bonding and bridging activities and the notion that we need a healthy balance of both to create resilient networks.
Clearly it's the bonding opportunities that attract most of us to social media and the development of our personal networks. How excited we become by finding legions of like-minded people who finally "get us." It's the many instances of "me too" and "I've had that experience" that seem to most draw us together. They are a big part of what makes learning through social media so rewarding--we feel part of a large learning family.
These bonding activities help us build strong networks, but how resilient are those networks in adapting to change? Again from Newman and Dale:
"A densely developed social capital network can, for example, lead to the exclusion of outsiders, make excess claims on group members, and restrict individual freedom (Portes, 1998). Bonding capital has the potential to hinder social innovation by 1) cutting off actors from needed information and, 2) imposing social norms that discourage innovation.
My interest in homophily developed as part of my consideration of why edubloggers and bloggers involved in workplace learning were not having more dialogue on 21st century literacy skills. I realize now that what I was observing was that the bonding behaviors for both groups have been very strong, creating internal cohesion, and a great sense of community. However there have been fewer bridging behaviors connecting the two communities, effectively cutting each group off from learning more from the other. This, in turn, may seriously impact both groups' abilities to adapt to the changes they are currently experiencing.
Bridging behaviors, argue Newman and Dale are what help us create resilient networks:
Bridging social capital allows actors to access outside information and overcome social norms with support from outside the local network, in addition to increasing access to diverse forms of other capital. Because bridging capital brings in new and potentially novel information, it is here that bonding capital provides the group resilience needed to absorb the benefits of bridging capital; the two capitals are complementary. The sheer amount of social capital is not likely to be a good indicator of how well a community will be able to engage problems. It is a dynamic balance of bonding and bridging social capital that builds resilience and makes the difference between a small community “getting by” or “getting ahead” (Dale and Onyx 2005).
What strikes me here is this quote: "The sheer amount of social capital is not likely to be a good indicator of how well a community will be able to engage problems."
Right now, we have a huge quantity of social capital that is being developed every day. If I look at the communities I'm dealing with, for example, new bloggers come online constantly, adding their voices to the conversation. But the issue isn't the quantity, of course. It's the mix of bonding vs. bridging that goes on that truly is the measure of the effectiveness of the network, both on a large scale, as well as in individual personal learning networks. If my personal learning network consists of people who largely think as I do, then I'm focusing too much on bonding and not enough on bridging and need to find a way to develop greater bridging social capital. It's why sometimes I feel like I'm stagnating ("getting by") rather than growing ("getting ahead.").
Developing More Bridging Social Capital
The question becomes then, how to engage in more bridging? I actually think it begins with diagnosing my tendencies toward homophily--a homophily self-assessment if you will. This is something I've started to do here and, through comments, discovered that Tom Hamilton is doing on his own blog. The first step in solving a problem is to admit you have it.
I can also start building bridges myself between the various communities I belong to, something that Meryn Stol suggested I do.
But these are relatively simple steps that don't get at some of my deeper concerns. What I'm wondering now are things like:
- How do I find and connect to more diverse voices online? As I said the other day, I don't know that this is an issue of me being more interdisciplinary--I already read a fairly diverse set of materials. This is more about finding the voices that don't echo what I already believe. I'm honestly not sure how to do that? How do I do a search on "the opposite of The Bamboo Project"?
- What do I do about not having access to a lot of other perspectives? How do you connect to groups of people who are not online and who may not be part of your physical network either?
- What are the best ways to build bridges between communities? I can do as Meryn suggested, visit various blogs and leave comments and links to pull the two groups together, but does that work? And if only a few people do it, can you really achieve the critical mass necessary to build the bridges?
- How do you get homophilous communities to be more open? One of my ongoing frustrations with building bridges between academic and workplace learning communities (both on and off-line) is that both seem to be closed to the perspectives of the other. The work world is dismissive of education as being too "academic" and not getting the real world, while educators feel that businesses don't understand the pressures and issues that they live with. Each may be speaking some truths, but I also think that these are symptoms of the closed networks that each group has created. Homophily breeds intolerance and polarization.
- How can we get technology to help? The current state of social media is that it tends to build strong bonds, but it doesn't necessarily contribute to building bridges. Nat Torkington has some ideas here on how to mix things up. I'd like to actually see these at work in social software.
This is obviously an ongoing issue for me, something I'm trying to understand as I honestly believe that we will not get the full benefit of social media until we can figure out how to build more resilient networks through bridging social capital.
What ideas do you have for how we could build more bridging behaviors and opportunities into our online activities? How can we find more diverse voices and create connections between different communities so we could learn from each other?
Photos via Michelle Brea and WisDoc
One of the things that I love the most about blogging is comments. Yes, I usually enjoy putting my thoughts out into the ether, but even more than that I want to hear back from people about their thoughts, ideas, etc. Comments are the lifeblood of blogging and for new bloggers, they can be the difference between sticking it out for the long haul and throwing in the towel. 
Amy Sample Ward has a file that she calls "fun":
What I wonder, though, is if that's enough. Reading blogs outside of your tight interest areas is, no doubt, a good step forward in combating online homophily, but is that really exposing us to different ways of thinking?
In some sense, yes. Different disciplines (i.e., art, science, learning, etc.) have different underlying frameworks for thinking about information, using it, acting in the world, etc. A business mind-set isn't the same as an artistic one.
But I don't think that being interdisciplinary is enough to combat what I'm talking about. I don't think that homophily means that you just have a narrow range of interests. I also think it's about staying within narrow cultural confines that you may not even be aware exist.
If I look at my feed reader, it is stuffed with blogs and news sources that span a broad range of topics, from art, to business, to science and technology. BUT, for the most part, the authors I'm reading are decidedly Western and all are English-speaking--mostly from the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. From what I can tell, most are white and all are over 18. I have a few Indian bloggers in my reader, so that broadens things a little, but honestly, not by a lot.
Because I don't speak another language, I'm not able to read any blogs or articles from non-English speaking authors, not easily anyway, so clearly I'm missing something in terms of their perspectives. And the mere fact that we're still in the early stages of social media adoption means that I'm also hearing from people who have a more technological bent and the means and resources to express themselves online.
My point here is that while I may be reading across a range of disciplines, am I reading across a range of cultural perspectives and various world views? I would say that I'm not. And I doubt that I'm an exception.
Ethan Zuckerman in his post, Homophily, Serendipity, Xenophilia, says:This makes sense to me, although I would also argue that we need to have a better sense of the broad range of cultural belief systems that exist within our own country.
As I've discussed here before, my husband and step-son are African-American. It is only through several years of intimate contact with them that I've been able to fully appreciate the complexities and differences in our world views that are a result of our very different backgrounds. Yes, we are American and therefore share a number of beliefs. However the experience of being a black man in America results in a decidedly different world view when compared to my experiences as a white woman. Add in our differing socioeconomic and religious backgrounds and you can see where this creates opportunities for many misunderstandings, as well as deep learning.
My experiences of being married to someone who comes from a very different background than mine have shown me how much I had taken for granted about world views. And I think this is one of the problems of homophily, online or in real life. It's insidious, operating in the background, and it's not until you're engaged in a dialogue with someone who has different ideas of and values about things like the individual vs. the group or attitudes towards authority that you truly appreciate how narrow-minded you can become. If we don't actively challenge ourselves to fight homophily, we can quickly lose sight of the fact that it even exists.
Who Is Online and What Are They Doing?
My point here is that if we are getting a lot of information from and engaging in dialogues with other bloggers (as many of us are), it's easy for us to forget who is NOT part of the conversations. We end up operating in siloes without even knowing it.One of the things that I think we easily forget online is that there are a lot of people who are NOT represented there. Zuckerman, for example, argues that there's a very real digital divide between developing nations and the developed world when it comes to using social media. We also have continuing divides within our own nations. In the US, only 56% of African Americans are online. I was unable to find the percentages of them who are blogging, but I would assume that it's even less than what we see with white Americans because there are fewer African-Americans online. And Danah Boyd has done a nice job of raising the issue of socioeconomic class in MySpace and Facebook, pointing to another kind of digital divide.
This is a problem with social networking sites, too. If we're operating in Facebook, for example, then are we hearing from and connecting to other perspectives? Statistics indicate that only 14% of Facebook users are non-white and 58.4% of them have some college education. Is that representative of a broad range of views and perspectives? I don't think so.
Homophily online is already problematic in that the characteristics of social software tend to draw us toward like-minded people. This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that even if we are to fight those tendencies, we may still be missing significant cultural perspectives because these individuals aren't even a big part of the online social commons in which we're operating.
Why Should We Care?
Why am I spending so much time and thinking on this issue? Because I think that it's the hidden problem of homophily that creates silos we don't even realize we're living in.
As this study shows, the more we deliberate and discuss with other like-minded people, the more polarized we can become in our views of the world. It becomes increasingly difficult for us to imagine any other way of thinking about the world because we spend most of our time talking to people who think like we do.
I see this, for example, in myself. I tend to be attracted to people online who see the value of social media. The more time I spend conversing with them about how great it is, the more difficult it becomes for me to deal with "traditionalists" who are less enamored of the technologies. I find myself dismissing them as "Luddites" or wanting to argue them out of their beliefs, rather than trying to understand their thought processes or perspectives.
Further, as Zuckerman points out, the more we're blinded to homophily at work, the more likely we are to miss huge issues, trends and opportunities. This is what I meant when I said that the Internet was making me stupid.
Maybe what I've described here are my own personal failings. Maybe I'm the only one who has a decided lack of cultural perspectives represented in my feed reader. But I'm not sure that's true. I think that many (most?) of us do this, at least on occasion. It's human to be attracted to people like us--it makes us feel safe to say "me too" and to find our "tribe" of like-minded believers. Homophily is a sort of default setting that has the advantage of making use feel safe, but that can, in the process, blind us to the fact that we're no longer associating with other tribes on a regular basis. The first step in changing this, though, lies in recognizing that we're doing it, even if we think that we aren't.
Photos via chrisjfry and puroticorico