homophily self exam

...another serendipitous step between ancient and new paradigms, and one more flat earth story.

I've been following a blog by Ethan Zuckerman called ...My heart's in Acra, where he writes about international development and using the disruptive quality of the web in global activism. Zuckerman just posted a link yesterday to Amy Gahran's Contentious blog, where she picks up on an interview  Zuckerman did where he brought up the notion of homophily.

Wikipedia defines homophily as "the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others." These similarities could be based on ethnic identity, socioeconomic status, political views or religious beliefs. Whatever the bond, the result is easier communication between like individuals, and more difficult communication between unlike individuals. As Zuckerman says, "homophily makes you stupid."

Gahran's post Breaking out of the echo chamber does an excellent job of  bringing together Zuckerman's and her own ideas, along with some other resources on the topic. What's on my mind, though, is how to check whether I am homophily positive.

I just did a quick check and saw that, of nearly 120 feeds in my aggregator, about one-third are about education, and half of those are about ed tech.  Several, but not many, are about politics, and an equal number are about underdevelopment and changing the world.  I gravitate toward one Turkish newspaper, two English language cable news channels, and generally choose the documentaries and books that reinforce what I already believe and know. In previous jobs and in previous places I experienced more --sometimes continuous-- challenges to my "knowledge."  "Knowing more" now has possibly resulted in learning less.

The photo here shows don Benjamín Ortiz, one of a select group of people who taught me how my "knowledge" had shielded me from the truth. Benjamín is Guatemalan, a native speaker of the Mayan language Takaneko, and a coworker during the three years we did ethnolinguistic research and assessed the viability of mother tongue literacy.

Family and national circumstances being against him, Benjamín attended school for only two years before going to work. As an adult, he was recruited into a rural health promoter program, which inspired him to finish primary school by correspondence. During our first year together he successfully finished 6th grade. Sometimes we went through his textbooks together, and one day we looked at a geography lesson that explained that the earth is round.

This concept was completely outside his experience and reasoning. "If the world is round," he said, "then why are all pictures of the world flat?" Challenged, I tried to draw the continents on an orange, but at that scale Guatemala was just a speck. It was outrageous that this rugged, mountainous country, where 200 miles makes for a 12-hour journey, counted for nothing.

I wrote about this conversation in a letter to a friend in the US, who kindly sent back a beach ball globe. Benjamín and I spent a lot of time studying it, playing with a flashlight to figure out night and day, pondering imponderables such as why were my in-laws in Morocco going to bed when we in Guatemala were just having breakfast.

Benjamín's willingness to let me challenge such a commonly held belief stood in sharp contrast to my own inflexibility. I had dual degrees in Spanish language and Latin American studies, trained for ethnolinguistic fieldwork, and armed with the weapon that laid all knowledge captive at my feet: literacy. I showed up on the scene equipped with an understanding of the geographic, economic, and historical reasons for poverty, and ready to use demographics and dialectology to decide the fate of a language.

I was ashamed that these tools did not prepare me for life with no electricity, no bathroom, and nearly no water. Hamlets wiped out by measles. Legitimate crops destroyed instead of poppies in the US' war on drugs. Aching, crushing poverty that forced families to pull children from school because they couldn't afford pencils. The arrogance of the government doctor who showed up for two days every two weeks and let Benjamín's sister die without treatment. An entire society that functioned without the printed word. The truth was, all my learning did not prepare me for knowing people whose lives were so different from my own.

The only way out then, as now, was to start over, discarding the assumptions that kept me from seeing what I needed to see.  I still need to accept that I might be wrong, or at least that others can be right, suppress the arguments in my head, and learn things over.
 

Comments

[LindaH]

Great post Tom. I've been feeling the need to include more challenging stuff in my reading recently too. Looking for those dissonant voices action because that's where the learning emerges. Trouble is they are hard to find in the edublogosphere (YUK that's not a word!)
Instead I've found myself watching a BBC series about schools in China. Their methods are so far from all I see as important and yet there is undoubtedly powerful learning going on. I need to think more about this..

[Amy Gahran]

Thanks for writing this, and for linking to my post. I think you're on the right track. I'll conduct a similar homophily self-audit -- although I'm sure it won't be pretty...

- Amy Gahran

[Nancy Riffer]

I like your blog because you stimulate me to new learning. Clear, provocative ideas. This issue reminds me of doing diversity training and asking a group how many are racially prejudiced. Those who are most aware of racism are the one's to raise their hands. Similarly, in this post, you are questioning your openness because you are aware of closedness. You help us stretch.

One important experience I learned from about my assumptions was being a part of the board of a group formed right after 9/11 and listening to Muslim women. WTB.org I heard a woman describe her experience growing up without a father because he was killed by the Israelis. A woman from Iraq cried when she was asked where she was from. I discovered most of the Muslim women did not judge even though parts of people's stories were outside what was acceptable for themselves.

My learning challenges usually come from hands-on experience. I wonder whether reading "ideas" different from my own could be a source of learning. My guess is that real people telling personal stories is the more powerful for me.

[tom]

Thanks to all of you for your encouragement. This idea has stuck in my mind as well, not just for a single blog post. Nancy's experience is just the kind of thing that helps us detect those blindspots. The question I'm sensing from everyone though, is how to increase our exposure to such challenges and then use what we've learned.

[Michele Martin]

Tom, thank you for pointing me to your post. I think you and I are on the same journey right now of recognizing that homophily can be be both a powerful way of bringing people together and learning from them, but that it can also be an equally powerful way of dividing us. I love your idea of a sort of homophily self-assessment. I think that it's a good first step for all of us to consider if we hope to really reap the full benefits of a networked world. We're strong on the bonding capital, but need to be looking more at what we can do to build bridging capital in our social networks. I look forward to seeing where this leads.

[Sarah]

i believe the old adage is that when you enter a new culture the first person you meet is you. it's what one chooses to do from here that opens the mind and enlarges the circle of learning and cultural awareness.