How social media can distort our views

 The "Breaking the Social Prism" by Bail suggests an important point about the influence of social media in the digital era. Social media sites have emerged as one of the most crucial resources we have for learning about ourselves and one another. Our addiction to social media stems from the fact that it enables us to do something that is innate to humans: present various incarnations of ourselves, consider the opinions of others, and alter our identities accordingly. Social media functions more like a prism that refracts our identities, giving us a distorted understanding of ourselves and each other rather than a massive mirror that allows us to view our entire society. In other words, social media can create a perception or an illusion in our heads that is different from what is happening in the real world. This reminds me of the famous book "Public Opinion" by Lippman.

You can hear the author talk more about "breaking social media prism." Source: YouTube Channel of Chris Bail.

Throughout the book, the author already presents the data to support his argument about how social media can strongly affect social media users in the political aspect. However, Chris Bail does not present some theoretical frameworks except the echo chamber to explain the participant's behavior in his research. I will take this chance to list some key theories that can support his claim.

The four axioms from the book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by Zaller in 1992.

1. Axiom 1: "The greater a person's level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely he or she is to be exposed to and comprehend - in a word, to receive - political messages concerning that issue," which is originally from (McGuire, 1969).

2. Axiom 2: "RESISTANCE AXIOM. People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and their predispositions."

3. Axiom 3. "ACCESSIBILITY AXIOM. The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use."

4. A4. "RESPONSE AXIOM. Individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or accessible to them."

The hostile media effect. 

A phenomenon known as the "hostile media effect" occurs when partisans on opposing sides of a dispute believe that reports from neutral media outlets are biased against them. It means that when a user is exposed to political information from media, two things can happen. One is "biased assimilation," in which people uncritically accept information that confirms their views but ignore or discount contrary information (Lord et al., 1979; Vallone et al., 1985). Two is because of either selective recall, a process in which arguments that go against what you believe are more important and therefore easier to remember than arguments that support your view, or selective categorization, a process in which partisans label both opposing and neutral content as being against your view (Vallone et al., 1985).

Four axioms and the hostile media effects are explained effectively for both cases of Patty and Janet when following the information bot in the experimental conditions. As a result, in addition to the echo chamber theory, exposing media also sharpens the contrast between “us” (ingroup people with like-minded people) and “them” (outgroup people with unlike-minded people). Moreover, social media with the algorithms (as we already discussed in class last week) strengthens this and creates the polarization manifest.

What should we do in the case of the social media prism? Chris Bail suggests three ways to hack this. First, we can learn to see the prism and understand how it changes who we are and how it changes the identities of others. The second thing we can do is learn to look at ourselves through the prism and notice how our actions give the prism its power. Finally, we can figure out how to break the prism by changing these habits and learning how to have better conversations with the other side. I think this process is feasible and seems to be a solution for now. However, I expect more than that. I hope that Chris Bail can develop his solutions hypotheses to research in order to prove that he is right.

References:

Bail, C. (2022, September 27). Breaking the Social Media Prism. Princeton University Press. http://books.google.ie/books?id=sUZpEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=breaking+social+media+prism&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 2098–2109. doi: 10.1037/00223514.37.11.2098

McGuire W. J. (1969). "The nature of attitudes and attitude change." In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology, 2d ed. (pp. 136-314). Reid, S. A. (2012). A self-categorization explanation for the hostile media effect. Journal of Communication, 62(3), 381–399. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01647.x 

Vallone, R. P., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1985). The hostile media phenomenon: Biased

perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 49, 577–587. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.49.3.577

Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.