The Internet, especially in its incarnation as a hub of social networks, “can exacerbate our natural tendency towards homophily — birds of a feather flocking together — or it can mediate that same impulse,” according to a team of journalists and communications professionals competing in The Knight News Challenge, a recurring contest that steers funding to media innovators.
They’re hoping to encourage the latter outcome.
Aside from one data-driven dating Web site that offers an “enemies” rating, “there are very few online opportunities to be presented with people who oppose rather than mirror your preferences,” they write. Thus their proposal: “an engaging tool that helps readers discover previously unexplored news items that their ‘opposite’ (politically, demographically, geographically) reads instead of news stories endlessly aggregated across their own narrow social networks.”
