Selective Exposure, Social Media, and Cascade Activation
https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy007
This article, from the Journal of Communication, is about the impact of selective exposure through social media on online information cascade. Traditionally, there are huge gaps between the segments of content production and content viewership. Information online does rely heavily on different methods to attract publicity, one of which is content sharing via social media. The article talks about selective exposure and this occurs when people are seeking content that aligns with their beliefs. The authors of this article thus use this effect to argue that it serves to activate a cascade in which people are actively consuming the content that aligns with their beliefs and their arguments about different issues around the world. An example of this mentioned in this article is the topic of politics in Argentina, where human rights activists are organizing protests through social media. With the extensive amount of support and sharing on social media, people were able to influence other people in their network to come together and to further push their agenda. In this case, there was a high rate of selective exposure, leading to network activation and cascade.
Upon reading this article, I was immediately reminded of the filter bubble in which selective exposure causes. Since people are continuously choosing to be exposed to the same type of content, it creates an echo chamber in which they are not seeing arguments from the other side of the story. In class, we learned about an information cascade and how it can facilitate imitation in a social setting. The example described in the article is similar because I can see how seeing the same content over and over on Argentinians’ social media feed facilitated the protests. Even though some may not have any initial interest, seeing the content may result in people doing more research and ultimately convince these people that the protests are for a good cause. In class, we talked about people can make decisions sequentially based on observing the choices who those acted earlier. This can also be exemplified in the previous examples as Argentinians may see pictures of other people at the protest, leading to interest and ultimately a cascade of the next network of people.