I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
Online shopping or wikipedia isn’t going to polarise people. I’m sure many people here were early adopters, and hung out on usenet or mailing lists, but this was not the norm. It was around 2005 when myspace turned online socialising into something mainstream, and 2008 when not being on Facebook was actively contrarian, and a few years later when even the contraians gave in.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions. It was only with facebook and twitter that opinions boiled down to one sentence.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions.
Blogs can still express complex opinions. The political impact of a figure like Glenn Greenwald who writes long blog posts is much higher than it was 5 years ago.
All Facebook users can self-report their political affiliation; 9% of U.S. users over 18 do. We mapped the top 500 political designations on a five-point, −2 (Very Liberal) to +2 (Very Conservative) ideological scale; those with no response or with responses such as “other” or “I don’t care” were not included. 46% of those who entered their political affiliation on their profiles had a response that could be mapped to this scale.
As with my earlier comment, the data represent the US alone, but imply that the vast majority (95%) of Facebook-using adults there don’t care enough about politics on Facebook to put a recognizable political affiliation in their profile. This doesn’t contradict the experiences of the posters here who regularly encounter fighty partisans on Facebook (and real life?), but I’m not sure they’re typical.
Perhaps a selection effect helps to explain LWers’ encounters with Intense Facebook Politics: LWers may be unrepresentatively likely to run into (or even be) Facebook partisans. From the survey, we’re young (median age 26 — hence more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook than middle-aged technophobes), 37% of us are students, and over a quarter of us have consistently strong left-wing views on stereotypical contentious political topics (with a further 6% who simply rate themselves 5⁄5 on their interest in politics).
(The “over a quarter” comes from taking the 8 rate-this-from-1-to-5 items on “Abortion”, “Immigration” and so on, and summing each person’s ratings, reverse scoring the “Human Biodiversity” item because that’s the only stereotypical right-wing item. 272 people left at least one item unrated, but the remaining 1157 people had total scores between 0 and 40, higher scores being more left-wing. 402 people scored 32 or higher, which means 28% of all respondents had an average rating of 4+. Not one respondent gave similarly right-wing responses; the lowest score was 9. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the political self-identification data.)
Online shopping or wikipedia isn’t going to polarise people. I’m sure many people here were early adopters, and hung out on usenet or mailing lists, but this was not the norm. It was around 2005 when myspace turned online socialising into something mainstream, and 2008 when not being on Facebook was actively contrarian, and a few years later when even the contraians gave in.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions. It was only with facebook and twitter that opinions boiled down to one sentence.
Blogs can still express complex opinions. The political impact of a figure like Glenn Greenwald who writes long blog posts is much higher than it was 5 years ago.
True, its possible the political influence of blogs has increased, but as a percentage of online politics blogs have massivly decreased
That has some plausibility. Contrarian that I am, however, I have some more opposing evidence in my pocket.
In one of life’s little coincidences, a potentially germane Science paper appeared on the same day as your comment. I’m less interested here in the paper itself (though it has some relevance) than in a snippet from its supplementary materials:
As with my earlier comment, the data represent the US alone, but imply that the vast majority (95%) of Facebook-using adults there don’t care enough about politics on Facebook to put a recognizable political affiliation in their profile. This doesn’t contradict the experiences of the posters here who regularly encounter fighty partisans on Facebook (and real life?), but I’m not sure they’re typical.
Perhaps a selection effect helps to explain LWers’ encounters with Intense Facebook Politics: LWers may be unrepresentatively likely to run into (or even be) Facebook partisans. From the survey, we’re young (median age 26 — hence more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook than middle-aged technophobes), 37% of us are students, and over a quarter of us have consistently strong left-wing views on stereotypical contentious political topics (with a further 6% who simply rate themselves 5⁄5 on their interest in politics).
(The “over a quarter” comes from taking the 8 rate-this-from-1-to-5 items on “Abortion”, “Immigration” and so on, and summing each person’s ratings, reverse scoring the “Human Biodiversity” item because that’s the only stereotypical right-wing item. 272 people left at least one item unrated, but the remaining 1157 people had total scores between 0 and 40, higher scores being more left-wing. 402 people scored 32 or higher, which means 28% of all respondents had an average rating of 4+. Not one respondent gave similarly right-wing responses; the lowest score was 9. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the political self-identification data.)