UGA DC Semester Program

A lot of what I do at my internship involves using the internet. I use it to do research, communicate with people in my office, and to kill time once in a while reading blogs and catching up on how the Atlanta Hawks are doing. Being as I’m not particularly interested in politics, the blogs I follow are mostly either amusing ones like the Dilbert Blog, or economics ones like Freakonomics and A Marginal Revolution. There’s not really a big polarization of thought in these fields, but recently I’ve noticed something interesting when it comes to the blogs that many of my co-workers follow.

The other day I was covering for another person in my office and I decided to snoop around through their bookmarks and favorites (don’t judge me). Going down the list of sites this particular person frequents, I realized that they were increasingly leftist, from CNN.com to many other blogs like Democracy Now! and TalkLeft. This got me to wondering: Has the internet helped foster democracy or has it really hurt it? Typically, when a theoretically infinite amount of information is made readily available, the benefits should far out way the negatives. But have they?

The problem, I think, comes from the fact that while this information is so abundant, people are increasingly staying within their ideological comfort zones. One blog leads to another and soon enough your information inputs become more and more homogenous. Twenty years ago when people relied on the nightly news and newspapers for a majority of their information and opinions, there was a lot less polarization in national politics. People were forcibly exposed to viewpoints from the other side, or at least to more pragmatic and centrist ones. The enormous success of the internet has diminished this. You could also argue that the proliferation of talk radio had a similar effect In the 90’s.

Not that I want to vilify the internet for making politics today so cut-throat and generally disheartening, but I think it has most definitely had something to do with it. You see, people have limited resources (time), so people that in the past would have read both conservative and liberal editorials in a mostly centrist medium like newspapers now have no reason to do this. They can now use their spare time to leapfrog from blog to blog and keep within their comfort zone. Not to say that the political parties have become so much more ideologically separate (in fact, it might be the other way around). But there is without a doubt much less bipartisanship.

Ironically, there have probably been thousands of blog posts on exactly this topic, but I spend all my time reading Dilbert and have never seen any of them. So next time you’re killing time at the office and delving deeper and deeper into socialism or neo-conservatism, pick up a newspaper instead. Or at least just play some solitaire.