Do You Browse to the Left, or the Right?
Do You Browse to the Left, or the Right? -
If we were to peek into your browser history, would we be more likely to find Rush, Beck and O’Reilly, or Sullivan, Yglesias and Ariana? Do you even know?
Turns out there’s an app for that (of sorts).
Meet Balancer, a free add-on for the Chrome browser that was developed by Sean Munson, an assistant professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. The free plug-in analyzes your browsing habits over a 30-day period using a giant database of known political sites that have been ranked along a spectrum from -1 (O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Beck) to 1 (Washington Monthly, Think Progress, et al). Browse too far to the liberal side and the tiny stick-figure tight-rope walker in the corner of your browser begins to teeter precariously to his left. Click on him and a window will pop up suggesting news sources from either end of the spectrum.
“In order to learn or to improve our understanding, we have to sometimes be exposed to information that is counter-attitudinal,” says Munson. Even if you think that information is wrong,”at least you’ll be aware of other points of views. … [We] tend to develop better solutions, more out-of-the-box thinking” when we are seeing all sides of an issue, he explains.
The idea for the project was planted in the late ’90s, when Munson, then still in high school in New Jersey, started a political blog “to have a discussion with people on both sides of the aisle, with different points of the view.” The blog started to take off, but by the 2004 election, he says, he realized the tone of the conversation had just become angry and polarized. “That wasn’t my goal,” he laments.