Cass Sunstein on Media Fragmentation ( Week 2, Reading 1)
Is the fragmentation or segmenting of audiences on the Web an opportunity to report deeply on a topic to a narrow audience? Or does it spell the decline of general-interest publications? Other thoughts on the article?
Please comment here on this article by noon, April 14.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Micro-targetting opportunities abound on the Web allowing journalists and advertisers to reach niche audiences with specific, narrow content. I don’t think the availability of such content will spell the end of general-interest publications but will change the way they present content. The popularity of news aggregators (Google News, for example) indicates user demand for general-interest content exists. Users just want content, whether niche or mass, they can control.
The Web offers general-interest publications the chance to offer more in-depth information to readers who want it and attract some of the niche audiences and advertisers. Print publications can direct readers online for more in-depth analysis.
I found this article disturbing and the group think and polarization discussion compelling. It makes logical sense that if like-minded people come together via the Web they can re-enforce their beliefs both good and bad. I feel this article illustrates the importance for online journalists and bloggers to acknowledge or discuss contrary viewpoints via links and discussion boards.
While Sunstein ends this chapter pointing out that this framework also applies to positive group think and that polarization can result in social progress, he could have included some positive examples to balance out the negative examples.
April 13th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I thought Sunstein’s discussion about filtering was interesting. The ability of readers to filter their information so they only consume news they’re interested in is both one of the extremely useful features of the internet, and also one of the most potentially damaging.
Filtering can be great. I use Google Alerts to send me information about topics that I’m interested in, which saves me a lot of time picking through sites on the internet. I also have websites that espouse certain beliefs that I check regularly, and thus get all the news that particular website deems relevant. Even when I read traditional newspapers online, I self-filter, and only click on the stories that seem interesting to me.
This bothers me, though. I find that I absorb a lot more useful information when I’m sitting down with a broadsheet in my hands, preferably on some form of public transportation with nothing else to do. While I might not have clicked on an article about Iraq on the internet, I’ll do less self-filtering when it’s on the printed page in front of me, and it’s usually good for me to read the article.
So, I find filtering more beneficial (at least for me) when I can filter IN information that I would not otherwise have gotten, but not necessarily to filter OUT. Does that make any sense?
April 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
- Godwin’s Law, Wikipedia
From the Wikipedia article: “There is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically ‘lost’ whatever debate was in progress.”
It’s delightfully fitting that an academic piece about online communities suffers from the exact same fate. This article should have been shut down on page 63, paragraph 2.
I believe he is missing two big ideas.
First, he ignores the great value of the comfort many find online that they can not find offline, where geographical or social constraints prevent contact with other people of similar beliefs. Depending on where you live, it can be quite difficult to be a vegan, cat-fancier, software developer, leather freak, Battlestar fan, homosexual or young Republican.
Second, he fails to notice that people are members of many groups online, not just one. I might support Ron Paul, knit, eat organically, and pierce my naughty bits — and I’ll be on mailing lists for all four. Online communities give people the opportunity to participate in a variety of discussions and interact with people very different from myself. My buddy on the naughty-bit site might be a socialist bee-keeper.
There is no “serious danger” in any of this. The Internet is jam-packed with heterogeneity. I call Godwin. Put this piece out of its misery.
If you’re into this stuff, Cory Doctorow’s book Eastern Standard Tribe (free CC-licensed download) is a worthwhile and fun read. In it, he describes a future where online communities put you in touch with your people, no matter the location, to the extreme that your group synchronizes around the only physical thing you do share, the need for sleep.
April 13th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I googled “All Men Must Die,” hoping to test Sunstein’s hypothesis about fragmentation leading to extremism (I lean left). But alas, their website is gone, so I may never know. (Note to men: Be grateful.)
I don’t think Sunstein understands the Internet all that well. He didn’t account for some key elements of Internet use (and human life) that, I think, make his argument kind of weak. Examples:
1 - People who use the Internet do not exist in a vacuum. Most of the people who visit the chatrooms at resist.com (White Aryan Resistance’s page) probably also live in environments where other white people hate people who are not white. Microcommunities of extremist psychos already exist. The Internet helps them find each other, but I don’t think it’s increased their societal legitimacy, and I don’t think it ever will. If anything it’s made them less legitimate - anyone with a computer can see how crazy they are.
2 - Often it’s nice for people to find others who are like themselves, especially if they live in a place where they feel ostracized because of their views or lifestyle. Imagine a burgeoning human-rights activist living in a community of KKK members. That person might find hope in daily emails from MoveOn.org.
3 - People visit lots of websites. I would guess (really, this is just a guess) that people are exposed to more views because of the Internet - not fewer. Just because we have opinions and join groups doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about what we’re reading/watching/seeing.
4 - The Internet doesn’t incite much real action, at least not in the US. How many people who see something enraging on the Internet get up and fight it or protest it? Not many. How many write two sentences about how pissed off they are or sign an online petition? Tons. Same holds for extremist groups. Given the choice between an active KKK meeting and an active KKK message board, I’d choose the message board any day.
I don’t know if any of this makes much sense… It just struck me that there were some major holes in Sunstein’s argument, so I’m responding. My arguments have holes, too.
April 13th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I can’t really tell if Sunstein’s argument is for or against filtering. But I know that I use filters every day as I navigate the Internet. It would be impossible to extract anything from the masses of information available out there. (And once again, this article is so old that I can’t trust the data, and i find myself getting stuck trying to remember if I was one of the millions of pre-pubescent girls clicking on titanicmovie.com.)
I use news wires and email alerts and I have a list of 10 or so sites that I look at every day because I know that their content will be of interest to me. I click on links from sites I know and trust because I can be reasonably sure that I will like that site, too. But, like Erica, I still enjoy sitting with the paper and reading through every thing. I don’t want to realy on my current worldview. I want to challenge myself and learn about new topics and ideas. So I read the paper and read comment boards on news articles that I don’t know anything about.
I think this reading was written before the explosion of social networking sites. That adds an entirely different dimension to filters and communities and newsgathering.
I liked reading the two selections together — I think each covered areas that the other author overlooked.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
In reading Sunstein’s article, I actually was a bit confused about some of the points that he was trying to make. One point that stood out to me was his confusion about why people engage in ‘filtering.’ As stated by other people here, without filtering, it would take me forever to locate the information that I need to complete my tasks, whether they are for academic or leisure purposes.
I also found his ideas on group polarization kind of odd, along with his suggestion that the virtual world invites a sense of homogenization. A specific example that can prove this point wrong is the existence of Second Life, a world that is every bit as diverse as its real-time counterpart.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Though he makes some interesting points about self-selectivity, I have a couple problems with his ideas. First, though political sites might not link heavily to pages with alternative views, this overlooks how people actually use the internet. Most people get sent links by friends and family that may challenge the ideological routine people fall into.
Second, his assumption that the internet is fundamentally different from what we have seen before is flawed. As he notes, self-selectivity has always been an issue, but it is not entirely clear how what happens on the internet differs from, say, skipping over the day’s news for the sports scores, or picking up The New Republic rather than the National Review.
It seems that what he takes issue with is the fact that national discourse has slipped from the hands of the elites and can now be carried on by anyone with an internet connection, including hate and fringe groups.
So it is not self-selectivity then that’s the problem, it’s interactivity. And in order to prove this is a problem, he has to show, for instance, that membership in hate groups has actually increased because of the net. But, unfortunately for Sunstein’s theory, the Klan reached its peak in the 1920s, a period when people had few information options. He’d also have to show that groups become more homogenous over time. But as we see now with, say, the Democratic Party, there is fracturing and debate going on within the group.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I have to agree that this reading was kind of odd. Sunstein seemed to spend a lot of time making up hypotheticals to merely make the point that the Internet can link together people with like interests, and that people with a specific interest or point of view are likely to visit sites that specialize in that interest or point of view and not sites that don’t.
I think his point about how personal filtering on the Internet can narrow what they see and read to just what they agree with is valid is an issue. I think that it should be a concern, but I agree with Erin’s point about the crazies. The Internet might unite the crazies from around the world, but it opens them up to the world, makes the rest of us aware of them and how crazy they are. Just look at what the Internet is doing to Scientology.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
When I went to college, there was this guy that strung himself to a cross in the public mall outside the library. It was a busy spot; a crossroads for most students between classes. The guy was frail and pale and he would scream and spit damnation at anyone and everyone.
Most of the time, a crowd would gather to watch him argue the gospels, the holocaust, abortion, homosexuality or some other divisive topic with a newly matriculated political science punk, or a senior that just couldn’t take it anymore. Which one was I? Both.
Nut graph: Extremists on the Internet are a problem because polarization prevents the public discourse from regulating itself. This would put John Stuart Mill’s undies in a serious bunch.
I must disagree with Erin: The Internet allows people to depart from reality and create their own, filtered vacuums on the Internet. People do not visit a variety of websites. WE do, because we are educated and curious, and we are anomalous. The Internet does incite action; Drudge, TPM, YouTube, Online evangelism…and it’s still very early.
We need to see these people. We need to hear all sides, so we can use our critical thinking skills to weigh differing bits of information.
I must disagree with Adam too: The KKK had ONE peak in the 1920s. The derivative hate groups may be fragmented, but taken as a whole, their numbers are much greater.
Let’s just hope the “enclave deliberation” that brings each group together also helps to keep them apart.
I love you both
-Sol
April 13th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Sunstein draws attention to an interesting layer of how isolating the internet can really be. She says that “new technologies reduce the ‘friction’ of ordinary life and permit people, with increasing ease, to devise a communications universe of their choosing.” Not only does it deprive users of face-to-face interaction with other people, in many cases it systematically confines people to cyber interactions with people who share very precise and similar views. I was especially impressed that despite her argument that people tend to use the internet to bolster their own opinions, and as a result, weakens democratic discussion, she made the effort to include the opposing arguments made for the internet as a tool for building greater democracy. In that way, she adeptly escaped hypocrisy.
It is terrible, yet somehow unsurprising, that in the few cases a radical site did link to sites of opposing views, those sites tended to be ones that were easily discredited or shockingly inflammatory, thus bolstering the original web site’s validity in an even more insidious way than those that did not contain links to opposing sites.
The psychology behind it is pretty intuitive. People gravitate to what makes them feel secure, in this instance, reassurance of their own world view. The part about people who read an ad for the car they just bought made me laugh. The group polarization theory was very interesting to me, and one that I have found to hold true in my experience. It makes sense that if you identify with other people who also believe what you believe, you will believe it even more. Similarly, if you do not identify with a certain group of people, you will be much less likely to find their arguments convincing, and hold onto your own ideas even harder.
I’ve heard of people posing in chat groups and the like, for example, a guy might pretend he’s pro-guns in a pro-gun forum, and then slip in some thought-provoking argument against gun ownership. The anonymity of the internet is useful in disguising your motivations in such settings. There may be companies who pay employees to go on customer review sites and write up scintillating reviews for that company’s product and then write reviews that trash the products of their competitors. And how is the average guy to know who’s being straight and who has less honorable intentions?
I think it is important to remember that extremism is not something to be feared, for, as she pointed out, the civil rights movement in the 60s was extremism.
And after reading her article, I suddenly have the urge to search out web sites that hold views that challenge my own web blog, and not just the inflammatory ones, but ones that are written intelligently, and to link to them.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I think that Adam makes a good point. Whereas I used to seek out reading things that matched my own viewpoints more (especially if I had to pay for publications and magazines– I didn’t spend much money on publications I didn’t like), all kinds of people send me links to articles that they like. It’s a really easy thing to share now. Few people would clip out paper articles from magazines in the past and send them to more than one person. So I actually think that I give attention to more viewpoints now than I would have before.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:28 am
When it comes down to it, there’s a good and bad side to filters. I just don’t think the bad side of filters is really something to fear because I’m not too sure the average person goes to the extremes Sunstein imagines.
It’s useful to be able to find news stories about topics you’re particularly interested in with ease. I also use google alerts and have been using “stumbleupon” to let me stumble on a variety of sites I may find interesting.
While we could use filters to block out viewpoints we have no interest in, I doubt the average person does that. Like Christa and Adam pointed out, we all get links from family and friends that introduce use to things you may have never had an interest in. And like Erica pointed out, many of us still like to pick up the paper, too.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:50 am
A weird article for certain. I felt that Sunstein vacillated back and forth between condemning the Internet for filtering people into blinder-wearing niches and praising it for bringing like-minded people together to broaden their horizons (although I definitely got the sense that he was leaning more toward the former opinion). While I think he makes some valid points about the dangers of being fed only the viewpoints you want to be fed, I don’t think the vast majority of Internet users fall into this trap. Extremists will always seek out other extremists… this was and has been the case since long before the arrival of the Internet. People will always gravitate toward their interests and passions, but this does not mean that they will not be confronted with other viewpoints along the way. Someone who reads a conservative publication will still be exposed to regular daily newspapers as well (even though they may not read them religiously or from front to back). Similarly, those who seek out extremist or fanatical websites will most likely come across websites of the opposing view in their quest. While they may not be swayed from their views, the exposure is more than they might have gotten without the existence of the World Wide Web. I guess I find it hard to believe that RSS feeds and online subscription preferences are going to be the downfall of civilization.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:22 am
This article made me think of the 2000 HBO documentary “Hate.com: Extremists on the Internet” that painted the threat of neo-nazism as a rising tide of e-hatred that would be unstoppable in the age of the BBS.
Certainly this trend of extremist communities continues to thrive at sites like stormfront.org or davidduke.com. Stormfront boasts more than 21,400 active members. I have a hard time believing that sites like this can ever really manifest into anything more than a collected archive of impotent ravings.
While its undeniable that the internet allows extremists to communicate in ways previously unavailable the same is true for voices of moderation such as tolerance.org
Extremists may be better organized but they’re still vastly outnumbered by moderates who will always have a need for “mainstream” media un-tempered by radicalism.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Ah yes, I get to harp on the recurring theme of bias. What’s that saying? Oh,yeah.
Ignorance is bliss.
And because ignorance is bliss, many writers won’t pay attention to the other side of the argument they are championing. As a result, the reader’s can’t pay attention to the other side of the argument because the writer hasn’t one a good job of presenting the argument objectively.
I must, however, tip my cap to the presentation of the linking graphics provided by sunstein. It’s interesting to see that he cited websites that actually link to opposing viewpoints. I suppose these bloggers might be considered objective, but only if they were working in cooperation with the other blog, and writing about the same issues.
But, in line with this.. How many Republican blogs are going to be linking to Democratic blogs? And how many ignorant skinhead and anti-semitic blogs are going to give the people they hate a voice?
April 14th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Is the fragmentation or segmenting of audiences on the Web an opportunity to report deeply on a topic to a narrow audience? Or does it spell the decline of general-interest publications? Other thoughts on the article?
As I read this article I got the feeling that Sunstein was participating in the kind of snowball effect extremism he was writing about. He sees some biased web sites, seeks out examples to support his hypothesis, and then, at the very end, mentions a few examples of when something outside of normal society going mainstream was a good thing. To pass over the civil rights movement gave me the impression that Sunstein had blinders on. That movement is a perfect example of more and more people taking on the views of an extremist group. That the civil rights movement was “good thing” is obvious. More importantly, the movement transformed a fringe sentiment into a mainstream American value.
That doesn’t mean these biased websites aren’t dangerous, both physically and to our democratic discourse. I read my hometown newspaper pretty regularly and I love the coverage of local events. But the comments are disturbing. If someone who has a foreign-sounding name is involved in a car accident, horrible racist comments appear immediately. Suicide victims are named. Posters often write false information about events that later posters than rely on. It doesn’t seem democratic and it’s far from what we’d all like to imagine citizen journalism to be.
My feeling is that the internet and all the material on it is just a reflection of humanity. The good, the bad, the horribly ugly. And I find that I don’t self-filter any more online than I do in real life. I always used to throw away the business and sports sections anyway. Will some violent or hateful groups gain momentum because of the internet? Yes. But many good things will come of it as well.