Escape hatch for the echo chamber: an interview with Dan Wagner

[jrineakter]

Data-driven discourse has the power to break down the silos that separate us. It is the escape hatch for the echo chamber.

The day the polls were all wrong
The thesis of WIRED’s June 2016 article “The Polls Are All Wrong” seemed hyperbolic at the time. Then November 8th rolled around.

Interviewed by data.world CEO & co-founder Brett Hurt, Dan Wagner, Founder and CEO of Civis Analytics, explains that the polls were all wrong for a surprisingly simple reason: polling methods have remained static as modern technology advances, causing a dramatic decrease in the representativeness of polls.

“The industry has been aware of some of the problems, but hasn’t built a technical replacement for how you do it at scale… that’s what we’ve thought about a lot at this company; how do you create these primary replacements for survey research, for both political campaigns and businesses, that meet the standards of today without the problems of yesterday.”

It used to be that when you called 100 people greece whatsapp number data on the phone, 10 would eagerly respond. Now only one or two may respond, and these one or two are extremely different than the average voter.

But if the polls really are all wrong, how do campaigns know who to target?

“The Trump campaign, interestingly, assessed that digital identity and digital community were hugely important — much more important than TV, much more important than volunteer hours on doors, much more important than phone calls. They knew that people wanted [digital community], and they were able to play into that. It was a mistake on our side not to realize that.”

Garbage in, garbage out
Every day, people are on the internet creating their own realities in terms of what types of information they choose to consume, and what sources they choose to consume it from. They are forging their own communities, which create and alter that reality on a daily basis. To be effective, campaigns now have to either be the creator of these digital realities, or penetrate the digital reality created by a more effective campaign.

“That will be the fundamental challenge for the Democrats over the next four years… that you have a set of people that exist in an isolated digital content silo, where their assumptions about people, their beliefs, and their community is completely segregated from the rest of the country.”

So how do we break down the silo?

“In order for a campaign to fight this, they first need to acknowledge it, then understand the digital topography of why it’s happening, and then build the means of breaking that silo… or else they’re screwed”.