Homophily vs the Generalized Other

Abstract

Most recent academic studies of homophily—the tendency of people to interact with similar others—lean to a sociological critique of digital technologies, rather than revealing fundamentally positive outcomes. A few solid philosophical endeavors have emerged from the fields of philosophy of technology and enactive ethics. This article adopts a sociological perspective to argue that digital social networks can serve as an ethical infrastructure for facilitating effective communication. However, they also face the challenge of organizing the myriad of individual voices present within them, so that the necessary moral conditions to mitigate homophily can be established. From this viewpoint, it is suggested homophily should be viewed not as an individual’s right to expression but as a cultivated echo-moral cultured landscape. Homophily is not an input but an outcome. Homophily does not happen without evaluating reception. A voice without assessment lacks the ethical dimension. By applying the theory of the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann, 2008), homophily can be conceived as the contribution of significant others. Most importantly, effective communication can be attained when new secondary institutions organize the input of significant others into a meaningful generalized other (Mead, 2015). As a result, I propose that digital technologies allow for ameliorating the moral character of the individual by shifting how one looks at communication: from an individual’s right to a voice into an ordered culture of voices, from preserving rights to serving rightly. This perspective could illuminate policymakers to establish right processes to avoid homophily and help individuals and organizations achieve effective means of communication and deliberation.

Keywords

• significant other
• generalized other
• peter l berger
• thomas luckmann
• sociology of knowledge
• george h. mead