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- Media and the Quantified Self
- Chapter 3: When What We Know is Who We Know
- Mapping Media Attention
- The Structure of Foreign News
- Agenda Setting
Infrastructure and Flow There are at least two ways to draw a map of San Francisco. You can start from satellite photographs, tracing the routes of streets, the coastline, and the locations of key buildings. Artist Amy Balkin chose to make a radically different sort of map. Her map "In Transit" is drawn by using data collected from thousands of Yellow Cabs as they travel the streets of the city. Yellow Cab uses GPS to track the location of their cabs, and released a large set of this data - stripped of information that would identify drivers or passengers - to a set of graphic designers, who built portraits of the city from this information.lxxiv 
From “In Transit”, Amy Balkin, 2006 Balkin's map reveals the major highways and streets of the city as thick, white lines of light, the aggregated path of hundreds of taxi journeys. The city's coastline and major parks emerge as dark spots, places taxicabs can't go. Other dark spots reveal neighborhoods where taxis rarely go, like Hunter's Point, a historically African American neighborhood in the south of the city. A map of flow is likely to be less complete than a street map of a city, but it carries information the traditional map lacks. On Balkin's map, it's easy to see paths from area airports to San Francisco's downtown, and east-west paths from the downtown to popular tourist attractions. But it's also possible to see a set of north-south paths that link residential neighborhoods and hospitals drawn by cabs acting as ad-hoc ambulances. The ley lines of the city become visible. You might not choose to use Balkin's map to navigate from Union Square to Fisherman's Wharf, but it's precisely the map you'd want if you were a city planner considering new bus routes or an entrepreneur wanting to place a gas station on a busy corner. Maps of infrastructure show you what paths people could take, while flow maps show you what paths people actually choose. And if most tourists walk to Fisherman's Wharf on Stockton Street, knowing that Stockton and Beach is a busier corner than Taylor and Beach could be the difference between success and failure of your new t-shirt store. Many of the maps we encounter in our lives map infrastructures. A road map shows us where we're able to drive in a car, a transit map shows us places we can access easily from a train, subway or bus. Cellphone coverage maps show us where our mobile phones will work and where they will fail. These maps are undeniably useful, but they can also be deceptive. Knowing that we can get from here to there doesn't tell us whether the route is so popular that it's likely to be jammed with traffic, or so unpopular that it may be circuitous, dangerous or hard to follow. American Express, Steamship Routes of the World, circa 1900 The history of industrialization is told in part in maps of infrastructure. Railroad companies were the first to mass-produce maps, working with printers to perfect lithography as a technique to produce intricate, detailed maps of lines running deep into the American frontier, or knitting together Britain's factories, mills and ports. In the US, the maps were literally propaganda documents - for railroad companies to turn a profit, they needed to sell the land bordering the tracks, granted to them by an act of Congress. Maps were printed in the languages spoken by new immigrants to East coast cities to encourage them to spread inland and settle the frontier. The least honest of these maps featured cities with familiar, easy to pronounce names - Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont - neatly lined up in alphabetical order along a railline. That these cities had yet to be built didn't decrease their appeal to migrants; the maps showed an empty wilderness as civilized and connected with the railroad land broker, conveyance for plows, seeds and other supplies, and the only way back to the communities they left behind.lxxv Almost as intricate as a Rand McNally atlas of railroad lines are contemporaneous maps of telegraph lines, showing the town-to-town connections that made it possible to send messages from Louisiana to Nova Scotia. Or the American Express Company's 1900 map of steamship lines, where the oceans disappear under thick red lines representing connections and distances between ports. The message of these maps is simple: our infrastructure connects the world, and if you join us, you'll be connected too. These maps don't help you navigate - they don't help you drive the train or steer the ship. They're maps of the possible, maps intended to excite the imagination. That message was echoed in the wave of maps that accompanied the rise of the commercial internet. Network providers offered maps of optical fibers connecting major cities that looked hauntingly like early railroad maps. (In many countries, fiberoptic cables followed rail lines, so the early internet maps were essentially rail maps.) Geographer Martin Dodge collected hundreds of early maps of the Internet, including maps of physical networks as well as maps of "topologies", the ways in which these networks route traffic to one another. As networks became more pervasive and complex, these maps took on an organic quality. The OPTE project was one of the last efforts to visualize the topology of the connected internet in 2005 - the visualization is a set of multicolored branches of unfathomable complexity, looking more like human neurons than like railroad tracks. It's impossible to read the OPTE "map" as anything other than an image, a symbol of an internet that is some complex, it should be thought of in organic terms, part of the natural order of things. lxxvi If infrastructure maps promise pervasive connection, flow maps offer different promises and different challenges. They're harder to make than infrastructure maps. Infrastructure tends to stay still - we can take a satellite photograph of train tracks and highways on a Friday and feel pretty confident that they're going to be in the same place on Sunday. That's not true with maps that show us traffic congestion, which can change minute to minute, and are invariably different on weekdays and weekends. Google's maps of San Francisco include information about traffic conditions on many of the streets shown on Balkin's cab map. On large streets and highways, information is available from state and national departments of transportation, which embed sensors in major roads to monitor traffic volume and speed.lxxvii For traffic data on smaller streets, Google asks their users for help. When you use Google Maps on your phone, you send information on your position and speed to Google's servers, which aggregate this data to make informed guesses about the speed of traffic on the street you're using.lxxviii In a blog post that let users know their data was being harvested to make traffic maps, Dave Barth, the product manager of Google Maps, referred to this practice as "the bright side of sitting in traffic". Understanding that users might find this "bright side" an invasion of privacy, Barth assured users that the data Google uses to make maps is anonymized, and that users can opt out of data collection. The understandable concern about privacy points to a core tension with mapping the flow of people: the maps can be tremendously useful, but producing maps rapidly veers into the realm of surveillance. It's very helpful to know that there's heavy traffic on Stockton Street so you can avoid being caught in a jam, but it's uncomfortable realizing that your phone, zipping down Powell, is broadcasting data that allows others to plan an alternate route. German Green Party politician Malte Spitz is concerned that mobile phone users are, for all intents and purposes, under constant corporate surveillance. In 2010, he sued his mobile phone provider, Deutsche Telekom, for access to all information the company had about his phone usage. He won the suit, and DT presented him with a spreadsheet containing 35,831 rows of data collected over the six months between August 2009 and February 2010. The information included who he called and texted and when he checked his email, information that painted a clear portrait of when he was awake, asleep, working or playing, and offered a thorough documentation of his social network. Each of the 35,831 rows of data included geographic coordinates that showed where Spitz and his phone were located. Mobile phone operators are able to make very accurate estimates of a user's geographic position by measuring the strength of the signal the phone receives from nearby cell towers - phone operators use this information to provide location information to the police or ambulance if a user calls an emergency hotline. (Increasingly, operators also give this information to law enforcement officials when requested - US mobile phone company Sprint provided 8 million records, many of which contained positioning information, in response to law enforcement requests between September 2008 and October 2009.lxxix) Spitz worked with German newspaper Die Zeit, who used the mobile phone data and publicly accessible data, like his Twitter feed, to build a map that shows his movements and activities over the period of six months.lxxx Exploring the visualization Die Zeit produced feels somewhat trangressive. Watch the map like a movie and you can watch Spitz roam his west Berlin neighborhood, orbiting Rosenthaler Platz. Focus the map on Nurenberg and the timeline tells you that Spitz was in town the morning of September 9th, 2009, and passed through briefly on November 20, 2009. Focus the map closely enough and you can discern the paths Spitz takes through his neighborhood and the beer gardens he favors. It feels at least as invasive as reading another person's calendar and only slightly less awkward than peering into his apartment windows with binoculars. It's easy to understand why law enforcement would be anxious to access this data - given the dependency many of us have on our phones, we're more easily tracked through this data than through police officers staking out our homes and haunts. An interviewer asked Spitz what he'd learned by looking at the visualization of his mobile phone records, showing his travels for six months. Spitz said that he was surprised to discover how small his personal orbit actually was: "I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me... I am not really walking that much around."lxxxi Faced with a map of our own movements, most of us would be forced to come to the same conclusion. And most of us would be surprised. We are more likely to remember the long trips we've taken precisely because they are often memorable events in our lives - the short trips we make to work and the store each day are routine, and forgettable. 
In early 2009, Canadian photographer John O'Sullivan used data from hundreds of airline route maps to produce a vast visualization of airplane routes. In his image (above), every commercial airline route he could find is represented by an arc between two cities. Routes flown by multiple airlines have thicker arcs, which darkens the best connected cities into key points on the map. From these thin blue arcs, the recognizable outlines of continents emerge from O'Sullivan's map, South America tethered to Spain and Portugal, Africa to Britain. Sullivan's map shows what's possible with a passport and an infinite supply of frequent flier miles: access, a few arcs away, to virtually any spot on the globe. (Note: might add details about his reasons for creating it from his email) 
Dr. Karl Rege and his team at the Zurich School of Applied Sciences used similar data to create a very different map, a video that shows commercial airplanes around the world in flight. Using data from FlightStats.com, which tracks commercial aviation, Rege's video renders each flight as a tiny yellow dot moving across the surface of the earth. Watching the 72 second video shows a day's worth of flights, and reveals patterns that aren't visible from a map of airline routes: A flock of planes leaving the eastern US for Europe as night falls in New York, a reverse flow from Europe to the US as midday reaches London. A dense net of flights between eastern China, South Korea, Japan in motion regardless of the time of day. The emergence of United Arab Emirates as a midpoint for flights between Europe and Australia. An almost total absence of flights from south to south, connecting South America, Africa or Australia. The most striking pattern in the Rege animation is the thick, yellow mass that covers the US, Japan, eastern China and Europe at the peak of their workdays. Even rendered as a single pixel, there's enough air traffic over the US - almost 25,000 flights per day - to render any features on the ground invisible. There's vastly more domestic air traffic than international traffic. In 2009, 663 million passengers departed from US airports. Only 62.3 million disembarked in other countries... and nearly 19 million of those landed in either Mexico or Canada. (And only 32.8 million of the passengers are Americans - the others are 29.5 million are nationals of other countries who've traveled to the US for business or vacation.)lxxxii International travel accounts for just 9.4% of air passengers and a smaller percentage of commercial flights, as international flights, on average, carry more passengers than domestic ones. The average airplane trip that begins in the US is 872 miles. The typical passenger at an American airport isn't leaving the country, or even traveling to the other coast - she's visiting a nearby city, often in the same time zone.lxxxiii Rege's visualization suggests that this pattern holds true in other parts of the world as well: Europeans are traveling mostly in Europe, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan. The infrastructure of air travel is global, but the flow is local. Imagine a vastly more complicated version of Rege's animation, which shows not just airline flights, but everyone's daily movements: the train to work, the car trip to the grocery store, walks to the park or playground. In 2008, Americans traveled 5.515 trillion miles. Airline trips account for about 10.58% of the total mileage (583 billion miles, in aggregate), though a tiny percentage (0.16%) of all trips.lxxxiv Patterns in other highly developed nations are similar, and in developing nations, people's movements are even more local, as public transportation and private cars are less pervasive, especially in rural areas. If we could visualize the trillions of trips people make on foot, bicycle, bus and car, the flights on Rege's animation would disappear in a blur of local movement. The sort of trans-national travel depicted on O'Sullivan's airline route map is a rounding error - less than 0.02% of trips Americans take, and a smaller percentage of trips taken by people worldwide. Graph our travels - individually or as a nation - in terms of frequency and length, and the curve that results shows a Pareto distribution, sometimes called a "long tail" distribution: the head shows lots of frequent, short trips, while the long, thin tail shows our occasional long trips. Those trips may be the ones we remember, but we spend most of our time taking shorter journeys, staying close to home. If we want to understand how we actually travel through virtual spaces, not just how we imagine ourselves to travel, we need to consider our flows, individually and collectively. We might start by putting ourselves under surveillance. Media and the Quantified Self When I first met Dr. Seth Roberts, we were both wearing numbers on our chests. The numbers were a intended as an icebreaker at a cocktail party. We'd all been asked to wear a number that signified something we were tracking: the number of miles we ran a week, the hours we'd slept the night before, our weight. I wore the number "1600", leading people to assume that I was bragging (and lying) about SAT scores - it was the number of words I was trying to write per day to finish this book. Roberts wore the number "6", and when I asked him what it signified, he contorted himself into an odd shape, shifting his body weight onto one bent leg and holding the other leg slightly above the ground. "It's the number of times a day I stand like this," he told me. Asked why he would stand like that even once a day, he explained, "I discovered that I sleep much better when I stand for nine hours a day. But that's not always practical." Standing on one bent leg, to exhaustion, six times a day gives him the same beneficial effects at a lower level of effort. He's got numbers to prove it. Roberts was the opening speaker at the inaugural Quantified Self conference in Mountain View, California, a gathering of "self-trackers", "personal scientists" and people who are trying to better their lives through monitoring themselves and studying the resulting data. Some self-trackers monitor their moods, others track the steps they take a day or hours they sleep. Roberts tracks everything. Since 1980, he's been trying to cure himself of poor sleep, tracking his hours asleep, diet, weight, exercise, mood and other factors. His experiments have tested a "mismatch theory", the idea that some of our discomfort with modern life comes from the ways in which our routines and practices vary from what humans were used to in the Stone Age. So Roberts tried skipping breakfast (to mimic eating patterns of hunter-gatherers), watching human faces on TV in the mornings (to replicate the gossip and social contact that anthropologists believe characterized Stone Age mornings) and standing many hours a day. His meticulously documented findings, correlating the quality of his sleep to his hours spent standing, convinced him to move to a standing desk and do much of his work while walking on a treadmill. The bent leg technique was one he'd discovered by accident, years later, and which he was testing, trying random numbers of bent leg stands a day to determine the optimum number that correlated with restful sleep.lxxxv If Roberts sounds a bit odd to you, that's not surprising, says journalist Gary Wolf, the host of the conference and one of the leading documenters of the Quantified Self movement. We've been very good about using data in the workplace to increase performance and efficiency, but it seems slightly transgressive to bring it into personal life: "The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy." But that's changing, Wolf argues, because sensors are becoming cheap and pervasive, making automated data collection easier, and because we can easily store and examine data on internet-connected webservers. Self-tracking will become common, he believes, allowing us self-discovery and self-optimization through data.lxxxvi What would we learn from surveilling ourselves in this way? Humans, for all our cognitive strengths, are pretty poor at long-term self awareness. We remember major events more than minor ones, and much of what we do everyday blurs into the background. I remember the hike I took over the weekend, but would be hard pressed to tell you how far I walk in the average workday. Add a pedometer to the equation and track my movements over the course of a month and it's easy to see that I'm pretty sedentary in general, and that the hike - while pleasant and memorable - is an outlier of high activity against a baseline of sloth. Whether this is helpful or depressing depends on whether I'm looking to change my behavior or not. But it's a helpful technique for shattering the illusions we all hold about ourselves. Most quantified self experiments focus on the body. But the self is broader than our pulse and blood pressure, our exercise regimen and sleep cycle. I'd been invited to Gary's conference to talk about some preliminary experiments I'd been conducting, considering a very different facet of the quantified self: consumption of media. As I thought about imaginary cosmopolitanism and the internet, I realized I wanted data about what news stories people were seeing online and offline, and what stories were capturing their interest. Americans consume a lot of media. The American Time Use Survey finds that the only things Americans do more often than sleeping (8.67 hours a night) and working (3.5 hours a day, on average) is watch television (2.73 hours a day.) (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm) The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press asked people how much time they spend with news - online, on television, radio and newspapers - and estimates that the average American spends 70 minutes a day with the news.lxxxvii Using a much looser definition of "information" - including broadcast media, video, print, telephone, computer, electronic game and recoded music - Roger Bohn and James Short calculate that Americans receive information 11.8 hours per day.lxxxviii Exactly what Americans consume is a trickier question to answer. Individual websites like The Huffington Post know what articles a user reads and how long they spend on a site (and use this data to optimize what stories appear on the front page) and advertisers are sometimes able to track users across multiple sites. But data on what individual news stories someone reads or YouTube videos they watch is harder to aggregate. And tracking what people read or watch in analog media - radio or broadcast television, newspapers - relies on media diaries, logs that individuals keep of their viewing or reading behavior as well as set devices that track the programs played on a sample set of televisions. The data that emerges from tracking media consumption is a multibillion dollar business. Even with access to pricey data sets from Nielsen or Arbitron, it would be hard to answer the question, "How much information from Africa did the average American get this week?" Rather than paying a media analytics firm, I tried the Seth Roberts approach, using myself as a test subject. For three months in the fall of 2010, I kept a diary of what I read, watched and listened to offline, and used a system called RescueTime to track my online behavior. RescueTime is designed as a productivity tool, designed to produce a scorecard judging how much productive time you spend at your computer versus "distracting" time - time spent writing versus watching YouTube videos, for instance. You can use it in a less overtly judgmental fashion, simply looking at what captures your attention during the average day. Much as wearing a pedometer can help shatter the illusion that you're getting a good workout walking from the parking lot, I found that my perceptions of myself and the image generated from my web browser history differ pretty sharply. I perceive myself to be a globally focused guy: I chair the board of a nonprofit international news project, I sit on the boards of two African media companies, and many days I write about current events in different corners of the developing world. But that's hard to tell from my media consumption. What's more obvious reviewing my online traces is that I've got a soft spot for internet humor and I spend an inordinate amount of time tracking the ups and downs of my favorite football team, the Green Bay Packers. (In fairness, they had an awfully good season in 2010, so there was lots to read.) Globally focused news sites like the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, South Africa's Mail and Guardian and my own site, Global Voices, received far less attention than reddit.com and ESPN... and comparing the amount of time I spent reading any news to the vast amount of time I spend reading and answering email was a soul-crushing discovery in and of itself. Initially, I'd planned to blog about my weekly media consumption - after the first week of tracking my behavior, I concluded that I was embarrassed even to share the files with my wife. If I wasn't seeking out international news online as often as I thought I was, I was stumbling over a surprising amount of it through a much older medium: radio. The most globally-oriented days recorded in my media diary were ones when I spent a long period of time driving. National Public Radio's Morning Edition and All Things Considered feature heavy doses of international coverage, as does the BBC World Service, rebroadcast by many US public radio stations. The less control I had over what stories I encountered, the more international news I heard - and I noticed that many of my online searches for news started with stories I'd first encountered on radio. Many self-trackers report that the act of logging their actions changes their behavior. If you're logging the food you eat during a day to track calories, the thought of recording the calories associated with a cheeseburger and fries can be sufficient to convince you to order a salad instead. My experiences with tracking media were similar. I believe that encountering international news is important, and I was dismayed to see how little I was seeking out. Pretty quickly, my visits to reddit and PackersNews.com decreased, and I found I was reaching for harder news sites during moments of cognitive downtime. It's possible that I spent 70 minutes a day encountering news - at least, it's possible on days when I drive with NPR on. But I spend vastly more time answering email and reading updates from friends via social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and many of the stories and articles I pay attention to come recommended by those friends. Looking closely at those sources of information, a clear pattern emerges. Much of my online interaction is with a very small set of people - correspondence my wife and a small handful of professional collaborators represented the majority of my email interactions, even though I've corresponded with many thousands of people in the past few years. And the people I correspond with most have something in common: in terms of age, ethnicity, national origin, socioeconomic status, and (for the most part) gender, those people look an awful lot like me. Homophily In the early 1950s, sociologist Robert Merton began the in-depth study of friendships in two housing projects, one in New Jersey, the other in western Pennsylvania. Merton and his associates asked people in these communities to name their three closest friends, and used the resulting data to offer generalization about the social forces that affect formation of friendship. Close friendships were most common between those of the same ethnicity and same gender, a finding that led Merton to propose a term for a tendency that had been observed millennia earlier, by Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics: "Some define friendship as a kind of likeness and say like people are friends, whence comes the sayings 'like to like', 'birds of a feather flock together'. Merton coined the term "homophily" - love of the same - to describe the phenomenon. It wasn't especially surprising to Merton that there were few friendships between black and white residents of these communities, though he expressly chose as one of his research sites a racially integrated housing project. What was more surprising was discovering homophily effects around beliefs and values - people who had similar points of view about racial cohabitation in housing projects were significantly more likely to be friends than those who had differing opinions. Since Merton coined the term, sociologists have seen homophily effects when examining social relations as intimate as marriage and as loose as the exchange of work information between professional colleagues, or the appearance of people together in a public place. Researchers document homophily effects around ethnicity, gender, age, religion, education, occupation, and social class. The phenomenon is so pervasive that the authors of a survey paper, generalizing from dozens of sociological papers, characterize homophily as "a basic organizing principle" of human societies and groups.lxxxix We seem capable of sorting ourselves - unconsciously, for the most part - by the most trivial of factors. A recent paper by Canadian researcher Sean MacKinnon demonstrates that individuals are more likely choose seats in a computer lab or a lecture classroom next to people who resembled their appearance in terms of hair length and color and whether or not they wore glasses. Questioned by MacKinnon in a follow-up study, students explained their choices in terms of perceived attitudes - they believed students who were similar in appearance to them would be more likely to share their attitudes and more likely to accept and befriend them.xc Considering the power of these homophily effects can be uncomfortable. Educational psychologist and university president Beverly Tatum titled a book on the development of racial identity "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" to point to the unease we feel when we witness self-segregation. (Tatum's book argues that this sort of self-segregation is necessary for students to become confident in their racial identities, a precursor to building strong friendships across racial lines.) A common reaction to learning about the sociological research on homophily is to conduct an internal inventory of friends to find personal counterexamples, seeking evidence that we're less subject to homophily effects than the average individual. Most of us think of ourselves as open-minded and unbiased, willing and able to have rewarding social relationships with people of all backgrounds - seeing evidence that this isn't always the case is disconcerting. It's a mistake to extrapolate from research on homophily and conclude that "Everyone's a little bit racist", as Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx do in a song from their wonderfully transgressive musical "Avenue Q". If you grow up in a community where there's little racial diversity, your population of possible friends is limited - sociologists call this "baseline homophily". People develop friendships with people they interact with in a shared activity. If you're an ice hockey player, you're going to meet a lot of white guys from cold climates - play cricket and your pool of possible friends will likely look very different. Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis used a huge set of data from Facebook - the complete set of postings for one class at one major university for a year - to study racial homophily online and in the physical world. They focused on photos that the students had posted - students who appear together in a Facebook photo are more likely to be "real" friends than people who've merely "friended" each other on Facebook, a behavior so common at most universities that it's not an unambiguous indicator of friendship. Wimmer and Lewis saw significant homophily effects, and were able to study homophily at a much finer level than in previous studies. They conclude that certain types of homophily - the tendency of Asians to befriend one another - are simply generalized effects from more specific homophilies: the tendency of Indian or Chinese students to befriend each other. And they see distinctive non-ethnic homophilies, including a strong tendency for students from Illinois, or math majors, to be friends with one another. (One group that showed the strongest homophily was students of America's most elite boarding schools, providing ample fodder for conspiracies about an American ruling class.) This finding suggests that the effects of homophily come at least as much from structural factors - Who did you have the chance to meet in high school? In the computer lab? - than from choice effects. The most powerful effect Wimmer and Lewis found in their model was a "closure" effect. If Jim is friends with Bob and with Sue, Bob and Sue are likely to become friends, closing the circle of friendship. If Jim is African, there's a higher likelihood than random that Bob and Sue are African - their friendship isn't the result of each seeking out the comfortable friendship of a fellow African as much as it's a product of social closure. Closure leads to the amplification of other homophily effects - Wimmer and Lewis's model suggests that it can quickly lead to all the black kids sitting at the same table. (They'd point out that, if we look closely, you'll likely see Nigerians sitting with Nigerians, African-Americans from Atlanta with fellow southerners.)xci In other words, if you discover your social circle is highly homogenous in terms of ethnicity, gender or national origin, it doesn't necessarily mean you're racist, sexist or nationalist. It likely means that your circle of friends has been shaped by where you've lived, where you've gone to school and what interests you've pursued. That there are deep structural factors that help explain homophily doesn't mean it's inevitable, however. The single biggest factor that predicted friendship in Wimmer and Lewis's set was students sharing a dorm room. The university they studied appears to have a policy designed to increase racial mixing - white students were rarely placed in rooms with other white students, for instance. Wimmer and Lewis reach an unambiguous conclusion about this policy: if it's intended to increase the number of friendships that cross racial barriers, it works. Imaginary cosmopolitanism is a homophily effect. Much as it can be uncomfortable to discover that your social network contains a disproportionate percentage of people who share your ethnic or cultural background, examining your online life and discovering biases of locality is disconcerting. But as with the students Wimmer and Lewis studied, structural effects help explain some of the phenomenon. Most of us (97% worldwide!) grew up in the country we currently live in. Our knowledge of other parts of the world, and our interest in stories from other nations is influenced by the people we know and care about, and those people are likely to be our countrymen, not someone from a different continent. And, like racial homophily, the fact that there's a good explanation for the phenomenon doesn't mean it's inevitable. Like a university assigning students to dorm rooms with an agenda of increasingly interracial contact and friendship, we can tackle our tendency to segregate ourselves in local media. We just need to rewire our media. Chapter 3: When What We Know is Who We Know In 2000, I had a longer commute than you do. I lived, as I still do, in rural western Massachusetts and I worked in the Osu neighborhood of Accra, the capital of Ghana. When all went well, it took about 24 hours to get to work, passing through Boston and Amsterdam enroute. All seldom went well. I was working with friends to start a technology volunteer corps, called "Geekcorps", which brought experienced computer programmers to work with Ghanaian software firms. While computer science is a well-established academic discipline taught in universities throughout the world, software engineering is a craft, learned through apprenticeship, working on projects alongside more experienced programmers. Ghana, where I'd lived as a student in 1993 and 1994, had no shortage of smart entrepeneurs who wanted to start web businesses, connecting Ghanaian artisans, craftsmen and exporters to global markets. It did have a shortage of experienced programmers to learn from, so we recruited programmers and graphic designers from the Americas and Europe who were willing to share their talents for months at a time in exchange for food, housing and the chance to live in Accra. Working on Geekcorps both mandated and cultivated a particular strain of optimism. Ghana, blessed with natural and cultural riches, has been slow to develop economically. Development economists, who study the reasons nations become rich or poor, are fond of pointing out that in 1957 (the year Ghana became independent), South Korea and Ghana had roughly the same per capita income. Thirty years later, South Korea had become a middle-income nation and was well on its way to becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, while incomes in Ghana had actually fallen. Like most African economies, Ghana was having a hard time making the leap from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Believing that Ghanaian software firms could jump-start a service sector, helping Ghanaian producers sell to international audiences or taking on outsourced tasks from companies in the US and Europe, required something of a leap of faith. At the same time, there were good reasons to believe that a bright future was possible. Ghana's national language is English, and many Ghanaians are well educated, able to quickly become productive at outsourced jobs. Ghanaians were already responsible for processing New York City's parking tickets, translating the scrawls of police officers into neat, searchable databases.xcii With plans underway for a massive underwater cable connecting Ghana to the internet via fiber, rather than via satellite, it seemed possible that Ghana might become a hub for English-language call centers and challenge India in the data entry space. But everyone agreed that it was unlikely Ghana could attract the investment necessary to build call centers unless investors believed the nation was politically stable and on an upward economic trajectory. It wasn't enough to be optimistic about Ghana's future - for Ghana to succeed, that optimism needed to be exported and spread. My commute between continents gave my ample time to read, and I boarded monthly flights armed with a stack of newspapers and magazines. I'd read The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times and leave my copies with Ghanaian friends, and return armed with The Daily Graphic, the Accra Mail, African Business and the New African. The African papers weren't as well written or professionally produced as the New York and London papers, but they covered local, regional and international news. The American and UK papers, appeared to have a blind spot that blotted out most of the African continent. On December 28, 2000, John Kufuor won the second round of presidential elections and became president-elect of Ghana. His election was unprecedented in Ghanaian history, and extremely rare at that point in African history: an opposition candidate won a free, fair and largely peaceful election, defeating a candidate backed by the former dictator, who had voluntarily relinquished his power. As someone who'd become professionally interested in good news from Africa, I expected the story of Kufuor's election and Ghana's dramatic change to be front page news in the US. Needless to say, it wasn't. At home for the holidays, I flipped through the Times, looking for American recognition of this rare, optimistic African story. When I found what I was looking for - a 300 word story buried deep within the paper - I was infuriated. No wonder we couldn't get American companies to take the idea of business in Ghana seriously! They weren't hearing any of the good news coming from the continent. In fact, they weren't hearing about Africa at all. In retrospect, I now realize that the Times did a pretty good job of covering Kufuor's election. They ran four brief stories on the elections over a week, and ten days after the election, a laudable editorial, titled "An African Success Story", that praised Ghana in just the way I'd hoped.xciii But at the time, the apparent undercoverage sent me searching for the wisdom of hard-bitten journalists, frustrated by the shortcomings of international media. I found an article by journalist Peter Boyer, whose angry reflection on media coverage of the 1984-5 Ethiopian famine included the observation, "One dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, who are worth 50 Arabs, who are worth 500 Africans."xciv I decided to conduct a simple experiment to see if Boyer's observation was true, that newspapers were systematically underreporting news from Africa. As it turns out, I would been better off searching the academic literature - William Adams tested Boyer's formulation in a paper called "Whose Lives Count? TV Coverage of Natural Disasters.xcv He concludes that US television coverage of natural disasters correlates to US tourist traffic to a country, a nation's proximity and the size of a disaster, but the cultural proximity factors outweigh the magnitude of the tragedy: the equivalent earthquake in Canada and Cameroon is likely to receive very different levels of attention, as American audiences are much more closely connected to Canada than Cameroon in cultural terms. But I wasn't even pretending to be an academic those days, so I started writing code, assuming than none of the world's media scholars had noticed the gap in attention between Africa and the rest of the world. Mapping Media Attention My experiment was less sophisticated than Adams's, but broader in scope. I wrote a series of scripts that polled the websites of major media outlets - the New York Times, the BBC, Google News and a dozen others - each day and searched for stories that mentioned the country or the capital city of over 200 countries and territories. Using this data, I produced daily maps that offered a summary of what nations were receiving more or less media coverage. And, like Adams, I used regression to figure out what factors best explain what countries are in the news and which get short shrift. New York Times Media Attention, week of 6/28/2010 The maps I produced were quite similar across media and across time - an attention map of the New York Times looks a great deal like one of Google News, though one represents a single source while the other aggregates thousands of sources. And they're surprisingly similar over time. It's difficult to tell a map from 2003 from one made in 2007s as the same general patterns hold. American media pays close attention to western Europe, to the large Asian economies (China, Japan and India) and to the Middle East, and much less attention to sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe and Central Asia, and to South America. Mapping media in this fashion raises a normative question: What would be the right level of media coverage for a nation to receive? Boyer's critique suggests that we might aim for an ideal world where each person's life or death is equally newsworthy, be they English, Arab or African. But that idea doesn't scale very well. There are 4,116 people in China for every one in Iceland - in Andy Warhol's world where everyone is famous for 15 minutes, we'd need several years of news about Chinese citizens before we received a single dispatch from Reykjavik. Perhaps news coverage should be proportional to news - real changes in the world. Or to news that might impact a reader or viewer - events in countries with strong economic or cultural ties to our own? Deciding what's news is both a thorny philosophical question and an intensely practical one: it's what editors do in newsrooms every day. Given the difficulty in defining what factors should contribute to decisions of newsworthiness, it's worth taking a close look at what factors - explicitly or implicitly - help explain what and who make the news. Disparities in media attention can be massive, even between countries with similar populations. Japan's population is just over 127 million and is slowly shrinking. Nigeria's population surpassed Japan's in 2002, and now exceeds 154 million, ranking it the 7th most populous nation. (Japan is the tenth.) There's no shortage of newsworthy events in either country, but their media footprint is vastly different. In an average month, US publications will run roughly 8-12 times as many stories that mention Japan as stories that mention Nigeria. This disparity in attention challenges many possible explanations for a media focus on one nation over another. If attention were proportional to population, we'd see a rising interest in Nigeria as it grows and Japan shrinks. If common language, religion or geographic proximity were the key factor, we'd expect to see more Nigerian news, as Nigeria and the US share a common language, a large Christian population and are physically closer than the US and Japan. If conflict drives coverage, again, we'd expect to more Nigerian stories, as the country has suffered ethnic and religious violence and terror attacks in the past few years, while Japan has been free of civil strife (though profoundly affected by natural disasters in 2011, well after I'd completed this study.) The single factor that best explained the distribution of media attention in US sources that I tracked from 2003-2007 was gross domestic product - for some US news sources, GDP explained 60% of the variation in news coverage. Japan is the world's third largest economy, while Nigeria ranks 41st, behind much smaller nations like Finland and Denmark. While I find it reassuring that there's an explanation for Nigeria's comparative invisibility that's more quantifiable than racism or Afrophobia, it's disconcerting to realize that US media seems to have broad blind spots that make it hard to see news from poor nations. The other major factor that helps explain US media attention is the involvement of the US military. Iraq and Afghanistan, both poor, were heavily covered in US media during the years of my study. And countries that rarely registered in the US media can vault to prominence when the US gets involved. When US marines landed in Monrovia, Liberia to help end the second Liberian civil war in August 2003, the nation - previously invisible on my maps - glowed red with media attention for about two weeks, then receded. The "GDP + US troops" model isn't a universal explanation, though. The BBC's attention profile was better explained by a model that considered GDP and Britain's colonial legacy - nations like Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa and India are more prominent on the BBC than on American media outlets, while parts of the world where Britain had far less colonial influence, like South America, are less prominent. Other countries show a strong interest in their neighbors and rivals - the Times of India features heavy coverage of Pakistan, India's chief military rival, and China, its chief economic rival. It's not clear whether a media agenda that focuses on a colonial past or on current rivalries is any more fair than an agenda tightly correlated to national wealth. What is clear is that all media agendas have biases - towards local news over international news, towards some people's stories and against others. The Structure of Foreign News I published a paper on my findings and started posting my maps to my website. Within a few weeks, I received an email from a journalism professor who politely wondered if I realized that there was a long history of research and activism around media attention. She suggested I start my research at the beginning, with a paper from 1965 by Johan Galtung and his graduate student, Mari Ruge, "The Structure of Foreign News". Galtung is a Norwegian sociologist whose six decade-long academic career has focused on questions of peace and conflict. He founded the Journal of Peace Research in 1964 and the Peace Research Institute Oslo, two of the central institutions in the peace and conflict studies community, and more recently, has captured public attention predicting the end of empires: the Soviet Union, which imploded in line with Galtung's predictions, and the US empire, which he anticipates will collapse in 2020. (He had previously predicted 2025, but accelerated his timetable by five years in recognition of the election of George W. Bush!) Before he began predicting the end of nations, Galtung and I shared a passtime: counting foreign news stories in newspapers. "The Structure of Foreign News" examines four years of coverage (1960-1964) by four Norwegian newspapers, looking at stories about three international crises, in Congo, Cuba and Cyprus. Galtung's goal in analyzing these stories, mostly reprinted from international wire services, is to determine "how do 'events' become 'news'?" He and Ruge suggest that we "tune in" on events in the same way that radio receivers tune into signals amidst the noisy mishmash of radio waves. If we're turning the dials (remember, this is an analog metaphor) on a shortwave radio, we're more likely to pay attention to signals that are clear, loud and meaningful, missing those that are noisy and unfamiliar. By analogy, Galtung and Ruge suggest a set of "news values" that describe events we're likely to register as news. News, they suggest, has a frequency: events that transpire over a very long time, like climate change or economic growth, are less likely to become news than those that happen within a 24 hour news cycle - a tornado or a stock market crash. Events that are unambiguous - good or bad - are more likely to become news, as are ones that are more meaningful to us, in terms of cultural proximity, relevance or comprehensibility. They suggest that newsworthy events navigate tension between unexpectedness and consonance. Unexpected events are more likely to be newsworthy than commonplace ones: man bites dog is news, while dog bites man is not. At the same time, they suggest that news is likely to reflect our preconceptions. We're more likely to get news of conflict or famine from Africa than an unexpected story about business opportunity. Galtung and Ruge see evidence to support Boyer's hypothesis that some lives are deemed more worthy of attention than others. They see "topdog" nations receiving more coverage than "underdog" nations, and elite persons, like leaders and celebrities, receiving more attention than average citizens. The dozen news values Galtung and Ruge offer can be helpful in analyzing current news imbalances. We might explain a systematic bias in attention to Japan over Nigeria in terms of F9 - reference to elite nations, or F4.1 - cultural proximity, while the light coverage of Ghana's presidential election might suggest that the story fails the test of F5.1 - predictability or F12 - reference to something negative, by being unexpectedly positive. The paper is more helpful in proposing these factors than in proving that they were at work in Norwegian coverage of the international events of the early 1960s. And Galtung and Ruge aren't very clear on whether these factors are on the minds of editors or are unconscious biases that influence news judgements. But they're convinced that the media we have today is an obstacle to peace: "Conflict will be emphasized, conciliation not." And they worry that an emphasis on powerful nations - at the time, the US and the Soviet Union - suggests a frame for news where events are analyzed in terms of whether they're good or bad for the West, not whether they're good or bad for the people directly effected by them. With such biases, events from poorer nations, particularly those that don't directly influence people in wealthier nations, are likely to pass unremarked upon. Agenda Setting Why would it matter that we hear more about Japan than Nigeria, more about American military intervention than progress made by African democracies? In 1963, political scientist Bernard C. Cohen offered one answer: the press "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about" Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw called Cohen's idea "agenda-setting", and set out to test it, surveying voters in the 1968 US presidential election and closely analyzing the newspapers and television they'd be most likely to access. McCombs and Shaw found a very strong correlation between what voters identified as the most important issues of the 1968 campaign and what issues were heavily covered in local and national media. It's possible that newspapers were reacting to the interests of the readers, but hard to imagine given the technology of the time - it seems more likely that the news outlets reporting the 1968 were promoting the importance of some issues over others and shaping what issues voters considered to be important.xcvi Like many important ideas, agenda-setting seems like an obvious one in retrospect. News tells us what's important that's happened outside of our personal experience. Because a near infinity of events occurs every day, we would be overwhelmed by a stream of non-newsworthy events: every city council meeting, every parlimentary debate, every petty crime. We need someone to tell us what events should be considered as news, and whoever is empowered to make that choice has tremendous power. It's hard to get outraged over the decision you don't hear about, or to mount a campaign to right an injustice you've not learned of. Whoever chooses what's news has the power to influence our cognitive agendas, to shape what we think about and don't think about. 
In a book examining US media coverage of the Vietnam War, Daniel Hallin offered a deceptively simple diagram to explain some of the implications of agenda setting. The diagram, sometimes called "Hallin's spheres", offers a circle within a circle, floating in space. The inner circle is the "sphere of consensus", which Hallin explains is, "the region of 'motherhood and apple pie'; it encompasses those social objects not regarding by the journalists and most of society as controversial." It's surrounded by a larger "sphere of legitimate debate", issues on which it's well known that "reasonable people" may have different views. In the US, the ideas that representative democracy and capitalism are the correct organizing principles for modern society are within the sphere of consensus - you'll see little journalistic coverage of arguments that the US should engage in a socialist redistribution of wealth, or subjugate our political process to a religious authority. The sphere of legitimate debate includes conflicts over abortion rights, restrictions on firearm ownership or levels of taxation. Stray away from issues where there's consensus or consensus over the sides of a debate, and you find yourself in the void that represents the "sphere of deviance", where points of view aren't even considered within media dialog. Hallin observes that the Fairness Doctrine, a policy of the US Federal Communications Commission from 1949 - 1987 which required broadcasters to devote substantial time to public issues and to ensure representation of opposing views, explicitly stated that broadcasters weren't required to give air time to communists. Directory: papers papers -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization papers -> The Tragedy of Overfishing and Possible Solutions Stephanie Bellotti papers -> Prospects for Basic Income in Developing Countries: a comparative Analysis of Welfare Regimes in the South papers -> Weather regime transitions and the interannual variability of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Part I: a likely connection papers -> Fast Truncated Multiplication for Cryptographic Applications papers -> Reflections on the Industrial Revolution in Britain: William Blake and J. M. W. Turner papers -> This is the first tpb on this product papers -> Basic aspects of hurricanes for technology faculty in the United States papers -> Title Software based Remote Attestation: measuring integrity of user applications and kernels Authors Download 0.54 Mb. Share with your friends:
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