Homophily, xenophilia and empathy.

Ethan Zuckerman has been on a fascinating tear about people’s tendency toward homophily: loosely defined as “birds of a feather flock together.” He sees it as a fundamental challenge both of new media technology — we’re more able than ever to find people that are like us and information that validates us — and of globalization — it’s more important than ever that we seek out and understand people different from us as cultures and countries clash.

On the global stage, his solution is to encourage the cultivation of xenophilia:

There are people in the world who are genuinely fascinated by the very breadth, complexity and difference of the world. Many of these people are “third culture kids”, people who were raised in one country but “from” another country. Others are people who live, work or love outside their home cultures. My colleagues at Global Voices are, for the most part, people identifiable as xenophiles. I think there’s an argument to be made that xenophiles are uniquely equipped to thrive in a globalizing world and that cultivating xenophilia should be both a personal priority and an aspect of a nation’s educational and diplomatic strategy.

In other words, the solution is quite simply to create a culture that intentionally counteracts homophily.

His latest post on the issue is quite fascinating, and I encourage you to go read the whole thing. Zuckerman has pretty much single-handedly convinced me that Cass Sunstein’s argument about the danger of folks surrounding themselves with political like-minds and comfortable information is a real challenge to democracy.

But Zuckerman’s call for xenophilia also reminded me of a similar conversation we’ve been having during this presidential election cycle about people’s ability to understand those who are unlike them.

In particular, I’m reminded of Barack Obama’s repeated argument that we suffer from an “empathy deficit.” As I quoted him saying in a piece about the topic last May, he said in a speech to college students:

There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.

As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier.

This politics of empathy is essentially an American xenophilia.

The internet in many ways makes it easier for us to indulge the worst of homophily. Liberals can hang out at liberal sites, conservatives at conservatives sites. And it really becomes more complicated than that, even. Libertarians can hang out only with and read only their own, socialists only with theirs, and on and on and on.

But we also have a dramatic opportunity. As Zuckerman puts it in discussing the opportunities for xenophilia:

The shift from broadcast media to read/write media has the potential to shift this equation. Rather than encountering people through the filter of professional media, perhaps we can reach them directly through their blogs, videos, photos. (This isn’t always possible – the digital divide is very real, and I’d argue that many of the arguments I made about digital exclusion in “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower” still hold.) We no longer need to wait for CNN to connect us with people and stories in Bangladesh or Brazil – the explosion of personal publishing means that someone is likely speaking up in those corners of the world.

The rise of the read/write web turns the problem of paying attention to the rest of the world from a supply to a demand problem. You can find Brazilian, Bengali and Bulgarian voices, but only if you bother looking for them, stumble across them or are led to them by creators and curators of content.

The same is true domestically. It’s more and more likely (although the digital divide is very real and very problematic) that that child, that steel worker, or that house cleaner Obama referred to, or someone like them, is out there writing about their life and the things they are experiencing. If we’re willing to seek them out, we can learn a lot and cultivate that empathy.

The challenge of the digital age isn’t about the supply of good information, as many old media nostalgists would have you think. The challenge is cultivating a citizenry that is doing a good job with the radical amount of choice they’re being presented with.

Will we embrace polarization and homophily, or empathy and xenophilia?