“Stewardship of global collective behavior,” a paper published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and co-authored by 17 researchers from around the world, including three from the UW Center for an Informed Public, continues to receive significant attention among researchers, tech policy analysts and news organizations.
The paper, whose first author is CIP postdoctoral researcher Joe Bak-Coleman, argues that the study of how communication technology is impacting human collective behavior needs to be treated as a “crisis discipline,” just like climate science, conservation science and medicine.
During a July 17 Recode podcast interview where he discussed the paper with Bak-Coleman, UW Department of Biology professor and CIP faculty member Carl T. Bergstrom said that “social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world. And they seem to have done so in a manner that makes people particularly vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.”
And with billions of people around the world who have smartphones that can quickly spread mis- and disinformation at great scale via social media networks, the stakes have never been higher as humans face serious mutual, existential threats from climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises.
On July 11, Bak-Coleman, Bergstrom and CIP postdoctoral researcher Rachel E. Moran joined Justin Hendrix for the Tech Policy Press “Sunday Show” podcast to discuss the paper in greater detail and some of the bigger questions the co-authors have identified about social media and its effects on human collective behavior around the world.
“When we’re thinking about society and large-scale behavior, we don’t have this networked, zoomed-out perspective,” Bak-Coleman told Hendrix. “There’s a lot we won’t be able to understand or make sense of.”
And that’s the reason why there’s an urgent need for science, tech platforms and society more broadly to pay attention to these questions.
“Crisis disciplines are disciplines where we’re trying to fix an unknown problem in a burning plane at 30,000 feet,” Bergstom told Hendrix.
“I’d like to see people in the tech community read this and think about this and start to think about the larger-scale impact of … our massive restructuring of our information systems and what impact that’s having,” Bergstrom said. “I’d like to see people in the social sciences and humanities read this, recognize this as a critically important problem in terms of understanding who we are right now and where we’re headed in a very short period of time.”
Additionally, Bergstrom said: “I’d like for natural scientists and people working in complex systems and things like that to realize that this is one of the great urgent, unsolved problems. It’s an interesting problem, a critical problem and it’s a really hard problem and we’re going to need input from a lot of places. I really want to reach, essentially, the breadth of the academic and tech communities.”
Moran, a communications scholar, said that although the “crisis discipline” label may feel like a “depressing diagnosis,” the paper is “a rallying cry for interdisciplinarity” to find common ground and new approaches to study these problems.
The paper has also seen recent attention from Bloomberg News, Eli Sanders’ Wild West tech policy newsletter, Politico Europe, Grist, Univision, Futurism, Clean Technica and KIRO Radio in Seattle, among other U.S. and international news outlets.
