Talk amongst yourselves

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Eszter Hargittai's (of Crooked Timber) gives us a preview of her study on "Mapping the Political Blogosphere: An Analysis of Large-Scale Online Political Discussions"

Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com talks about the potential for IT to fragment citizens? political discussions into isolated conversations. Borrowing from Negroponte, he discusses the potential for people to construct a "Daily Me" of news readings that excludes opposing perspectives. Sunstein argues that for democracy to flourish, it is important that people continue to have conversations with those in disagreement with their positions. However, he is concerned that with the help of filtering out unwanted content people will fragment into enclaves and won?t be exposed to opinions that challenge their positions.
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Overall, it would be incorrect to conclude that liberal bloggers are ignoring conservative bloggers or vice versa. Certainly, liberal bloggers are more likely to address liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers are more likely to link to conservative bloggers. But people from both groups are certainly reading across the ideological divide to some extent.

The results are interesting, and are likely to prove even more so once libertarian and "other" bloggers are drawn into the map. Will they emerge as translators across the red and blue divide, or as the strategic allies of conservatives, as many of them are in real-world politics?

more...

Another interesting question, and one addressed neither by Sunstein or by Hargittai, is whether the ideological divide is the one that we should most be worried about. I don't have the numbers with me, but I'm fairly certain that a disproportionate, vast, overwhelming majority of bloggers are highly educated, wealthier than average, and of the professional and academic classes. I also recall, from the "Power and Politics of Blogs" panel at APSA, that they are less likely, after taking up blogging, to engage in more "traditional" forms of activism, namely those that involve actual human contact. This is from the McKenna and Pole paper:

[T]he data show that bloggers are highly educated, white men who participated in more traditional forms of offline politics prior to writing their weblogs. A majority of bloggers are concentrated in occupations related to writing and education. Though the Internet offers great potential for non-elites to break through the barriers that the elite have erected to monopolize political discourse, few non-elites have taken advantage of this opportunity.
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Surprisingly, our data revealed a slight drop in traditional forms of participation by bloggers. In fact, most bloggers were more politically active prior to starting their weblog than we expected. ...However, there was no evidence that bloggers became more involved in more traditional forms of participation as a result of their weblog activities.

Traditional politics—ward meetings, rallies, conventions—offer the possibility that people with similar ideas but different demographics might actually interact. Blogging effectively restricts this interaction to other academics, pundits, journalists and other Geistesarbeiten. It reduces the exposure of the intellectual classes to the experience of, well, everyone else. Political debates might suffer a fate worse than balkanization: unintellegibility.

That, I fear, is more dangerous to a democracy than the predictable tendency of like minded individuals to talk to each other more than to the other side.