During last year's presidential election, American friends would occasionally tell me that Barack Obama's victory seemed assured because they hadn't met one person - not one! - who planned on voting Republican. They were right about the outcome, of course. But 58m people voted against Obama; it was just that you didn't run into them in the coffee shops of Brooklyn. By the same logic, I conclude that nobody in Britain supports the death penalty, that everyone's obsessed with The Wire, and that almost no one read The Da Vinci Code. Opinion polls will back me up on this, provided they're conducted entirely among the clientele of north London gastropubs.
The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as "homophily", and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we're barely aware of. It explains why, if you know the political positions of a person's friends, you can predict their own with near certainty. It's also why, say, creationists imagine that the debate over evolution is an active and unresolved one: in their social circles, it is. We long to have our opinions confirmed, not challenged, and thus, as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "Homophily causes ignorance." (It also makes us more extreme, studies show: a group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.) Even priding yourself on being open-minded is no defence if your natural, homophilic inclination is to hang out with other people like you, celebrating your love of diversity.
Technology, Zuckerman argues, risks making things worse: on the internet, most obviously, it's possible to exist almost entirely within a feedback loop shaped by your own preferences. For all its faults, the era when everyone watched the same news bulletin at least exposed people to information they hadn't been looking for. When you Google for something, by contrast, you're imposing the severest of filters, right from the start, on what you'll permit into your field of attention. On sites such as Amazon and iTunes, homophily is a selling point: it's the basis for "collaborative filtering", whereby you're recommended books and music on the basis of what others who made the same purchase - people like you - also enjoyed.
The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfilment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don't think we'd like?
You don't need technology to do that, but then again, technology needn't be the enemy: Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You're Least Likely To Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site LibraryThing.com: enter a book you've recently read, and it'll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people's bookshelves. Tell it you're a fan of Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason, and it'll suggest you read Confessions Of A Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
