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Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Christopher A. Bail (Author), Tim Fannon (Narrator), Recorded Books (Publisher)
4.4 out of 5 stars 66 ratings

A revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online - and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social media.

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society, but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off - detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help listeners avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit "reset" and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research.

Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.

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  1. Listening Length
    5 hours and 43 minutes
  2. Author
    Christopher A. Bail
  3. Narrator
    Tim Fannon
  4. Audible release date
    April 6, 2021
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Recorded Books
  7. ASIN
    B08TX58SB5
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
Next slide of product details

Product details

Listening Length 5 hours and 43 minutes
Author Christopher A. Bail
Narrator Tim Fannon
Audible.com Release Date April 06, 2021
Publisher Recorded Books
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B08TX58SB5
Best Sellers Rank

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4.4 out of 5 stars
66 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Kami Huyse
    5.0 out of 5 stars A roadmap to having less toxic online converersations
    Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2021
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    I am a big fan of "Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing." The author immediately drew me in with his well-researched look into breaking through the polarization that we see online.

    I ordered it first at an audio book, listened to it over 48 hours, and came back to buy it in hardcover to use as a reference.

    For someone like me, who makes their living using social media as a channel and teaches others how to do the same, this book was a game changer. Also, in my role on the board of Civilination.org a nonprofit dedicated to ending online harassment, character assassination, misinformation and violence, this book helped me to see a more defined road map to get there.

    As a human being, who wants to get along with others who do not think exactly as I do, this book held a blueprint to get there quicker. It is not hopeless, and it can be done. Chapters 8 and 9 lay out a plan to start to make meaningful change in how we can reduce polarization.

    In addition to sharing research from others, the author also shares his own primary research from the Polarization Lab and his depth of knowledge about this topic makes this a different kind of book.
    I think it will help a lot of people. So, you might be asking who should read this book? Here are a few that I think will get a lot out of it immediately.

    • Family members. Anyone who has relative or friend that thinks differently from you and you can't read their Facebook feed anymore, but you still want to get along.
    • Communicators, PR and Online Marketers. This is a must-read for those who use social media to promote their business or ideas (this should be required reading).
    • Psychologists and Sociologists. This book provides a window into what motivates people online, and how radicalization happens.
    • Social Justice Workers. Understanding how people became polarized can help to change our own behavior to be more effective in outreach.
    • Politicians. For those who aren't just trying to score political points, but who want to bring back the art of compromise.

    Chris Bail backs up all his ideas with research, including experiments run by his Polarization Lab. Many of the outcomes are counterintuitive. For instance, it turns out that just being exposed to the other side’s point of view might backfire. Also, he puts an unexpected twist on the idea of the echo chamber.

    Social media isn't going away, even when we wish it would sometimes. It has become part of the fabric of our lives. But it turns out that we might be able to come back from the edge, and it might even make those conversations at the Thanksgiving table more civil next year.
    11 people found this helpful
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  • Venkataraman G
    4.0 out of 5 stars A much needed anti-dote for bewildering times
    Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    Shattering popular myths and in the process, uncovering some extraordinary revelations, Chris Bail’s enormously influential book, “Breaking The Social Media Prism” is a much needed antidote in, and, for bewildering times where fake news proliferates and political polarization runs amok on various social media platforms. People hurl abuse and vitriol in 280 characters at one another, and are even ready to severe painstakingly nurtured family ties just to keep alive the embers stoking their flaming ideologies. In fact, economists Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla after tracking the average length of time people spent at Thanksgiving dinner several weeks after the divisive 2016 presidential election found that Thanksgiving dinners were 30–50 minutes shorter if they were attended by a mix of people from Republican- and Democratic-leaning voting precincts. Bail is a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, and also the director of the Polarization Lab at Duke. Engaged in the study of ‘computational social science’, Bail and his team conduct studies on online political behavior. Some of the findings thrown up by their research is, putting it mildly, jaw dropping.

    For example, the concept of ‘echo-chambers’ is most touted to be at the centre of all internet prejudices and biases that lead to online extremism. Hence the exhortations by social media experts for users to ‘step out of their echo-chambers.’ But what is it that exactly happens to/with a user when she does indeed step out of her echo-chamber? In a curious experiment, Bail and his team persuaded a randomly selected cohort of Republicans and Democrats to persistently listen to the views of their opponents. This was with an objective to ascertain changes in attitude towards opposing factions. The outcome of the experiment revealed an unfortunate trajectory. People who were even moderately conservative became staunchly conservative and mild libertarians became more entrenched in their dogmas.

    As Bail elucidates, the phenomenon of ‘false polarization’ exacerbates existing fissures and frictions. The term itself can be defined to mean “the tendency for people to overestimate the amount of ideological difference between themselves and people from other political parties.” For example, a national survey by the Pew Research Center from 2018 found that 55 percent of Republicans thought of the Democratic Party as “extremely liberal” while a little over a third of Democrats described the GOP as “extremely conservative.” A close examination of the data revealed that people who relied on social media to keep abreast of current affairs were prone to substantially exaggerating the supposed ideological extremism of their opposition party members.

    Further as Bail illustrates, this polarization also drags centrists further deep into hibernation mode. Alarmed and astonished by the extreme positions taken by extraordinarily aggressive people (Bail gives the example of an otherwise decent and impeccably well mannered man in real life who transforms into a filth spewing monster on social media. The man’s Twitter handle is replete with actual pictures of excrements, within each of which are placed studiously photoshopped images of prominent Democrats), these centrists shy away from expressing their valuable opinions and defer from contributing to all meaningful discourse. As Bail himself discloses, “70% of U.S. social media users never or rarely post or share about political, social issues according to this new report from Pew. A *STRONG MAJORITY* of Republicans with moderate views rarely or never post about politics.”

    While Bail blames convoluted algorithms predominantly for creating a polarization effect, he argues that there is room for optimism. Bail and his team invited a random population to test out a new customized experimental social media platform called DiscussIt. The participants were informed that they would be chatting anonymously with someone else. What the participants were not informed was the fact that the invite code that given to them to access the platform paired them a member of a different political affiliation. The topics for discussion were also provided upfront such as immigration or gun control. Unlike the earlier failed experiment on echo chambers, people who used the anonymous chat app to talk about either gun control or immigration depolarized much more than people who didn’t. That effect was even stronger for Republicans.

    Bail’s book is a treasure trove of details and information on seminal social science experiments. Some meriting especial mention include:

    The discovery by sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton of the principle of homophily. The two professors—who had been studying how new media technologies were shaping political beliefs—observed that people tend to form social connections with those who are similar to themselves. “Birds of a feather flock together.”
    German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, groundbreaking study on the role played by throbbing, teeming and vibrant salons in laying the groundwork for the systems of mass communication that emerged in the twentieth century;
    American Sociologist Erving Goffman’s amazing discovery that we read our social environments through a combination of verbal and nonverbal cues, including facial expressions, other types of body language, and tones of voice.
    Bail concludes his book by offering three practical and easily implementable “strategies” for breaking the prism of social media and its harmful refraction: “First, we can learn to see the prism and understand how it distorts our identities, as well as those of other people. Second, we can learn to see ourselves through the prism and monitor how our behavior gives the prism its power. Finally, we can learn how to break the prism by changing these behaviors and discovering how to engage in more productive conversations with the other side.”

    The most refreshing aspect of Bail’s book is the opportunity that it affords the reader for engaging in introspection. Everyone who is not a Jaron Lanier, (popularly and universally acclaimed as the father of Virtual reality who is now a social media apostate and a recluse living under a rock) and hence who automatically happens to be a social media user can relate to the concepts and ideas articulated by Bail. I myself got name called in a very incendiary vein a few days ago just for posting a clarificatory remark on the page of an acquaintance. That remark was, by no stretch of imagination, either a rebuke or a reprimand. A mild riposte perhaps. Such an unexpected jibe induced a spontaneous resolve never to post on that acquaintance’s wall henceforth. But on hindsight, there might have been a better manner in which I could have conveyed my thought process, not in terms of sincerity, but in terms of subtlety at least. But in line with the hope exuded by Bail in his book, there will come another opportunity.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Alejandro Pisanty
    5.0 out of 5 stars A solid case for a new view of social media.
    Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    This book makes a solid case for an alterative explanation to the usual "visual-viral-short attention span" explanation of political polarization in social media. Status seeking and an assertion of the self, especially for the most extreme views, are at work, based on the performativeness of speech (the book to its credit does not get lost in jargon.) It is well argued and documented; the experiments on which it is based are extensive and their design is described in the book for critical assessment. The author will make the reader think of alternatives to the present status of social media, though I am more skeptical of the remedies than compelled by the analysis; that seems to be part of our present problem.
    6 people found this helpful
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  • Alan Goddard
    5.0 out of 5 stars An important work, and and very accessible
    Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2022
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    I think Bail does an amazing job of identifying common truths and myths, and sorting them out, with good data. He raised numerous angles the average person hasn't thought of or understood. All this, and it was an easy read, not at all an intimidating academic work. Highly recommend, though it is definitely niche reading for people with a specific interest.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Anonymous
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
    Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2021
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    Very interesting argument and great practical solutions.
    One person found this helpful
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