Inside looking in (Image: Contrasto/Eyevine)
The global scope of the internet has only made us more insular, but there is a solution, says Ethan Zuckerman in his new book Rewire
YOU鈥橰E browsing a menu peppered with healthy food 鈥� and end up ordering the cheeseburger. The mere presence of salad somehow makes it easier to choose the unhealthy option.
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This well-known heuristic also informs the way we use the internet, says , who directs the Center for Civic Media at MIT, in his book Rewire. Like the salad on the menu, the web鈥檚 ability to put information about important global topics at our fingertips makes us more likely to burrow into our Facebook friends鈥� feed.
This tendency has contributed to a steep decline in our consumption of news about people who aren鈥檛 like us. Zuckerman shows how foreign news coverage in most US magazines and newspapers fell precipitously between 1979 and 2009. We demand more local and less international news, and it鈥檚 a tribalism that makes us bad global citizens, says Zuckerman.
The solution, if we wish to seek one, may lie in our allergy to shame, as Zuckerman illustrates in an amusing account of the consequences of US ignorance. During a soccer game between Brazil and North Korea in the 2010 World Cup, the top trending topic on Twitter was The Galv茫o bird, Brazilian tweeters explained, is hunted to extinction 鈥� every retweet would donate $0.10 to its conservation. The meme was soon unmasked: Cala Boca Galv茫o means 鈥淪hut up, Galv茫o鈥�, a joke aimed at the sports commentator Galv茫o Bueno 鈥� but also at the US twittersphere which ceaselessly retweeted it.
Shame is a powerful motivator, but it will need a boost from technology. Zuckerman has several inspiring suggestions for how to rewire the internet to nudge us to more global content, including improved machine translation to help us read posts in other languages. His point is best summed up in a quote from mathematician Duncan Watts: 鈥淛ust because something seems far away, and just because it happens in a language you don鈥檛 understand, doesn鈥檛 make it irrelevant.鈥� Now you just have to convince me to order the salad.
W. W. Norton
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淚nside looking in鈥�
