Free yourself from your filter bubbles Joan Blades and John Gable
Joan Blades: Do you have
politically diverse friends?
What do you talk about with them?
I’m a progressive; I live
in a town full of progressives,
and 15 years ago, I didn’t have
any conservative friends.
Now I have a wonderful mix of friends,
and they include John.
John Gable: I am not a progressive.
I’m a Republican who grew up
in a Republican family
in the conservative South,
and even worked in Republican politics,
locally and at the national level.
But the last 24 years,
I’ve been in technology
and living in a very progressive area.
So I have a lot of progressive friends,
including Joan.
JB: I was born in Berkeley, California,
a notoriously progressive college town.
And I live there now.
In 1998, six months into the Monica
Lewinsky-Clinton impeachment scandal,
I helped cofound MoveOn.org
with a one-sentence petition:
“Congress must immediately
censure the president
and move on to pressing issues
facing the nation.”
Now, that was actually
a very unifying petition in many ways.
You could love Clinton or hate Clinton
and agree that the best thing
for the country was to move on.
As the leader of MoveOn,
I saw the polarization just continue.
And I found myself wondering
why I saw things so differently
than many people
in other parts of the country.
So in 2005, when I had an opportunity
to get together with grassroots leaders
across the political divide,
I grabbed it.
And I became friends with a lot of people
I never had a chance to talk to before.
And that included leadership
in the Christian Coalition,
often seen as on the right
the way MoveOn is seen as on the left.
And this lead to me
showing up on Capitol Hill
with one of the Christian Coalition
leaders, my friend,
to lobby for net neutrality.
That was powerful.
We turned heads.
So this work was transformational for me.
And I found myself wondering:
How could vast numbers of people
have the opportunity
to really connect with people
that have very different views?
JG: I was born Oneida, Tennessee,
right across the state border
from a small coal mining town,
Stearns, Kentucky.
And I lived there
for the first few years of my life,
before moving to another small town,
Frankfort, Kentucky.
Basically, I grew up
in small-town America,
conservative at its heart.
Now, Stearns and Berkeley –
they’re a little different.
(Laughter)
So in the ’90s I moved out west
to a progressive area
to work in technology –
worked at Microsoft, worked at Netscape.
I actually became the product manager lead
for Netscape Navigator,
the first popular web browser.
Now in the early days of the internet,
we were just moved
and inspired by a vision:
when we’re connected to all
these different people around the world
and all these different ideas,
we’ll be able to make great decisions,
and we’ll be able to appreciate each other
for the beautiful diversity
that the whole world has to offer.
Now I also, 20 years ago, gave a speech
saying it might not work out that way,
that we might actually be trained
to discriminate against each other
in new ways.
So what happened?
It’s not like we just woke up one day
and decided to hate each other more.
Here’s what happened.
There’s just too much noise –
too many people, too many ideas –
so we use technology
to filter it out a little bit.
And what happens?
It lets in ideas I already agree with.
It lets in the popular ideas,
it lets in people just like me
who think just like me.
That sounds kind of good, right?
Well, not necessarily,
because two very scary things happen
when we have such narrow worldviews.
First, we become more extreme
in our beliefs.
Second, we become less tolerant
of anybody who’s different than we are.
Does this sound familiar?
Does this sound like modern America?
The modern world?
Well, the good news is
that technology is changing,
and it could change for the better.
And that’s, in fact,
why I started AllSides.com –
to create technologies and services
to free us from these filter bubbles.
The very first thing we did was create
technology that identifies bias,
so we could show different
perspectives side by side
to free us from the filter
bubbles of news media.
And then I met Joan.
JB: So I met John outside
of Washington, DC,
with an idealistic group
of cross-partisan bridge builders,
and we wanted to re-weave
the fabric of our communities.
We believe that our differences
can be a strength,
that our values can be complimentary
and that we have to overcome the fight
so that we can honor everyone’s values
and not lose any of our own.
I went for this wonderful walk with John,
where I started learning
about the work he was doing
to pierce the filter bubble.
It was powerful;
it was brilliant.
Living in separate narratives is not good.
We can’t even have a conversation
or do collaborative problem-solving
when we don’t share the same facts.
JG: So one thing you take away from today
is if Joan Blades asks you
to go on a walk,
go on that walk.
(Laughter)
It changed things. It really changed
the way I was thinking about things.
To free ourselves from the filter bubbles,
we can’t just think about
information filter bubbles,
but also relationship
and social filter bubbles.
You see, we human beings – we’re not
nearly as smart as we think we are.
We don’t generally make
decisions intellectually.
We make them emotionally, intuitively,
and then we use our big old brains
to rationalize anything
we want to rationalize.
We’re not really like Vulcans
like Mr. Spock,
we’re more like bold cowboys
like Captain Kirk,
or passionate idealists like Dr. McCoy.
OK, for those of y’all who prefer
the new “Star Trek” crew,
here you go.
(Laughter)
JB: Don’t forget the strong women!
JG: Come on, strong women. OK.
JB: All right.
John and I are both “Star Trek” fans.
What’s not to love about a future
with that kind of optimism?
JG: And having a good future in mind
is a big deal – very important.
And understanding what the problem is
is very important.
But we have to do something.
So what do we do?
It’s actually not that hard.
We have to add diversity to our lives –
not just information,
but relationship diversity.
And by diversity,
I mean big “D” diversity,
not just racial and gender,
which are very important,
but also …
diversity of age, like young and old;
rural and urban;
liberal and conservative;
in the US, Democrat and Republican.
Now, one of the great examples
of somebody freeing themselves
from their filter bubbles
and getting a more diverse life
is, once again, next to me – Joan.
JB: So the question is:
Who among you has had
relationships lost or harmed
due to differences in politics,
religion or whatever?
Raise your hands.
Yeah.
This year I have talked to so many people
that have experienced that kind of loss.
I’ve seen tears well up in people’s eyes
as they talk about family members
from whom they’re estranged.
Living Room Conversations were designed
to begin to heal political
and personal differences.
They’re simple conversations
where two friends with different
viewpoints each invite two friends
for structured conversation,
where everyone’s agreed
to some simple ground rules:
curiosity, listening,
respect, taking turns –
everything we learned
in kindergarten, right?
Really easy.
So by the time you’re talking about
the topic you’ve agreed to talk about,
you actually have the sense that,
“You know, I kind of like this person,”
and you listen to each other differently.
That’s kind of a human condition;
we listen differently
to people we care about.
And then there’s reflection
and possibly next steps.
This is a deep listening practice;
it’s never a debate.
And that’s incredibly powerful.
These conversations
in our own living rooms
with people who have different viewpoints
are an incredible adventure.
We rediscover that we can respect
and even love people
that are different from us.
And it’s powerful.
JG: So, what are you curious about?
JB: What’s the conversation
you yearn to have?
JG: Let’s do this together.
Together.
JB: Yes.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
JB and JG: Thank you.