The Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program’s first Spring Symposium, focusing on how society changes through social networking, attracted about 60 students and faculty in Harris Hall Thursday night.
The event, “Social Networks and the Good Society,” featured two speakers, University of Chicago law professor and author Cass Sunstein and University of Virginia professor and author Siva Vaidhyanathan, who delivered half-hour presentations on the digital age’s social implications. Communication Prof. Eszter Hargittai moderated the event, followed by a 45-minute question-and-answer session.
Sunstein focused his presentation on extremism in social networks, which he explained through three studies he worked on. The results of these studies indicate that when like-minded people gather to discuss their views on issues, their conviction that their own views are correct will likely be hardened.
In one of these studies, residents of Boulder, Colo., a liberal area, were anonymously questioned about their views on climate change, same-sex unions and affirmative action. The residents were divided into several small groups and discussed ideas on these issues and then were questioned individually again on the same topics. The results found the group collectively became more liberal. The same experiment was performed in Colorado Springs, Colo., a conservative area, and those results confirmed an increase in the participants’ conservative views.
These findings contribute to the fear that social networking based on similar interests may further polarize groups, Sunstein said. Though he said a discussion among like-minded people, usually on the Internet, can bring new and worthwhile ideas to the table, often any productivity is suppressed by the group mentality of these networks.
“Networks, through voluntary self-selection, are frequently too insulated,” Sunstein said. “The suggestion is that in a good society, when individuals move, it’s for good reasons because of the force of the argument, and not because of the logic of social interactions.”
Vaidhyanathan argued against the concept of today’s youth being “digital natives,” or more naturally able to use in recent technologies than their parents. While many students frequently use social networking communities like Facebook or MySpace, they do so because the programs are easy to use, not because the students are a digital generation, he said.
“There are lots of ways in which digital technologies have been profoundly revolutionary, but they’re not necessarily generationally revolutionary, and there are lots of ways in which both young people and old people have been affected,” he said.
The symposium ends the inaugural year of the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program, in which incoming Weinberg freshmen could enroll to fulfill their freshmen seminar requirements. In the program, 48 freshmen take a dual-course with team-taught lecture and seminar portions in both their Fall and Winter Quarters. The program focuses on the theme of the “Good Society,” exploring how societies through time have both chosen to and idealized organizing themselves.
The theme of this spring’s symposium was chosen to highlight the lasting importance of how societies develop and are structured, said Prof. Ken Alder, the program’s director.
“It’s meant to be kind of a suggestion that these questions are by no means closed,” he said. ” ‘What is the Good Society’ is still up for grabs, and inevitably will be debated.”
The symposium capped off the “graduation ceremony” for the program’s students, which included a dinner with university officials before the event, Alder said.
The symposium’s focus on social networks in the digital age was an appropriate way to end the program, Weinberg freshman Ben Rudofsky said.
“Myself and the other scholars are very much capable of discussing this topic, because we’re involved in it,” he said. “It’s a great way to make what we were discussing apply.”
