Came across this Slate article interviewing Cass Sunstein, someone Hobbes put me on to.
All about echo chambers… echo chambers… echo…cho… cho…
Found the link at Crooked Timber, which offers a different read:
[quote]…Cass Sunstein and his idea, reprised in Republic 2.0 that the Internet poses a threat to democracy by virtue of it’s capacity to allow us to
avoid information we don’t like. Conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views, and never the twain shall meet.
Sunstein argues that the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide.
It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. The partisan divide in the US is being reinforced because people are more exposed to the other side than before.[/quote]
Hard to get the same degree of fragmentation with 3 tv channels, only two or three regional papers, and a half-dozen radio stations. With 86 channels, as many papers and blogs as people care to publish, you can have several dozen factions within each party talking past one another. That wasn’t possible to the same degree in the past (although various socialist and communist orgs strictly promoting their own interpretations of orthodoxy gave it a good shot).
IMO, people who were likely to listen and consider the opinions of others in the past will continue, while those who only want have their pre-existing opinions validated remain so. It’s only the volume that’s changed.
the other side of that coin is you do have a lot more views accessible. there are also a great many balanced sources of information and forums. partisan divide is not really anything new, either.