Matt Schissler ----I spent the 2012 United States presidential election cycle in Yangon, Myanmar. Election day eve in the eastern US was early morning in Myanmar, and I sat with a group of American friends to watch results as the polls closed across successive time zones. Up at dawn, we had all pitched in to rent a cheap hotel room with satellite television, and we did our best to replicate the way we would watch an election back home: generic network coverage augmented by online news outlets, political blogs – and Facebook, where friends across the country were doing the same thing, posting updates, thoughts, and links. In Myanmar, our Internet slowed to a crawl. We had one satellite news channel and the only Internet page that would load: Facebook. Part of the modern American election tradition culminates in television news channels calling the results of the election, and we sat and watched as Barack Obama was announced the winner in successive states. On Facebook, my friends back home were increasingly celebratory. Of course they were; I am from the relatively liberal west coast, as are many of my friends, and nothing on my Facebook ‘newsfeed’ suggested that President Obama was anything but the superior choice. Seated next to me was a friend from conservative parts of Pennsylvania – his newsfeed was a mirror image of mine; that is, in complete reverse, heavily weighted towards the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. Reading either of our separate newsfeeds provided a view into wildly divergent realities – the difference only becoming fully intelligible when we sat our laptops side by side and read them simultaneously. Our newsfeeds seemed to be hermetically sealed; discourse was not crossing over. Perhaps this effect was heightened by our vantage point. We were in Myanmar, after all. Facebook and satellite news were our only windows into America, and looking through them we saw two different campaigns, two different expected outcomes. Two different countries. Information in Myanmar moves differently. Most of the country does not use Facebook; only 1% of the population has access to Internet.2 That is exactly why this anecdote matters. ----When we looked out over Yangon, we looked through windows in our communal hotel room. But more than glass mediated our view into the US presidential election. Eli Pariser has dubbed this the ‘filter bubble,’ his term for the way that information accessed online is filtered by search engines and social media interfaces, which seek to predict what users are likely to find interesting, desirable – and credible. Indeed, Pariser’s 2011 book The Filter Bubble opens with an anecdote strikingly similar to my experience on Election Day. “Without sitting down next to a friend, it’s hard to tell how the version of Google or Yahoo News that you’re seeing differs from anyone else’s,” says Pariser. “But because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what’s important, true, and real, it’s critically important.”3 For over a decade, Cass Sunstein of Harvard University, meanwhile, has raised concerns about negative impacts he believes new media are having on democracy in America. In 2001, Sunstein published Republic.com, in which he use the concept of an “echo chamber” to encapsulate the idea that, as people self-select their information sources – and the friends from whom they get information – an individual’s pre-existing beliefs and assumptions are reinforced because he or she hears only information the aligns 2 We Are Social, 2014 Asia-Pacific Digital Overview: We Are Social’s Snapshot of Key Digital Data & Statistics (Singapore, January 16, 2014), 132, http://www.slideshare.net/wearesocialsg/social-digital-mobile-in-apac. 3 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books/Penguin Press, 2012), 16. 2/13