Listening at scale: From cacophony to the will of the people

How do governments listen to their constituents? How do we listen to one another? And how can we better listen for the signals that represent the will of the people – our needs, preferences, and passions? Twenty-first century communications technologies have made creatives and publishers out of all of us, including many voices that had been unfairly suppressed in the past. But these technologies have also democratized and popularized the narrative wars of the 20th century, amplifying the most outrageous messages in ways that distort and degrade nearly all public discourse.

Fortunately, the same many-to-many communications infrastructure propagating so much noise and misinformation can just as well be re-purposed for organizing and evaluating information, finding clear signals of human need and passion, while filtering out redundant and misinforming junk. In this talk, sociologist and technologist, Dr. Nicholas Brigham Adams, will describe how new collective intelligence systems are poised to filter the fallacies and falsehoods out of our daily newsfeeds, organize our policy debates to avoid toxic politics, help everyone oversee Congress like a data scientist, and even tame police and protester interactions by identifying the complex dynamics that lead to street violence.

With demonstrations of emerging civic technologies, Adams will show how we are entering an era when large-scale, intricate analysis of public information, and web-based mass collaboration, will allow all of us to better listen, deliberate, and cooperate at scale.