On Quantifying Knowledge Segregation in Society

With rapid increase in online information consumption, especially via social media sites, there have been concerns on whether people are getting selective exposure to a biased subset of the information space, where a user is receiving more of what she already know, and thereby potentially getting trapped in echo chambers or filter bubbles. Even though such concerns are being debated for some time, it is not clear how to quantify such echo chamber effect. In this position paper, we introduce Information Segregation measures, which follow the long lines of work on residential segregation. We believe that information segregation nicely captures the notion of exposure to different information by different population in a society, and would help in quantifying the extent of social media sites offering selective (or diverse) information to their users.