Are “Bubble Cultures” Inescapable?

Marnie Webb says, “Social networks are like the Pandora site where you put in a song you like and they match it to similar artists. But, how do we expand our tastes in ways that we never thought of?”

Most social networking sites are relatively safe and unfettered places to create a sense of self in relation to one’s peers. What these sites are not good at yet, and might never be, is presenting two sides of an argument.

Says danah boyd, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, “We live in homogenous networks, and self-organizing magnifies cliques.” To be successful, social change efforts need broad, open networks that cross everyday boundaries to include people who are not just like us.

Otherwise, the views of young people are likely to be shaped almost entirely by their closest relations and friends. There is very little chance that they will come to fresh, unfettered opinions about issues on their own within these boundaries.

“Volunteering is certainly widespread and in that sense it is an ethos, but it’s an ethos that is also an echo,” says Harry Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. “It’s like a clump of trees left standing in a once vast forest that has mostly disappeared. It may be expanding, but it is usually marked by a kind of ‘bubble culture’ pattern that is part of the problem …

Even though people live in bubble cultures, however, most also want a culture shift or culture change (this is especially true among young people). The problem is that there isn’t much language of culture change—that ‘breaks the silence’ about how to talk about the alienation many feel to mention how to do it, without some practice.”

Social networks are ineffective for activists when they are too tight and become cliques. They can’t be too loose either, or they lose their sense of identity and purpose. Like Goldilocks and the porridge, they have to be just right to be effective. How to create and manage networks of participants that will broaden and not narrow policy and issue discussions must be better understood.