Upvoted for question dissolution and thorough analysis; one thing:
A binary Internet-use question seems like a bad metric; people were primarily consumers in the past, now everyone is producing content, or actively sharing the content that others have produced. Furthermore, a lot of people on this thread seem to be talking about Twitter and Facebook; even if everyone’s using the word Internet, clearly they mean social media (blogs included), and that’s what we should be talking about anyway. We wouldn’t expect considerably more polarization from people switching their consumption habits from TV and newspaper to big Internet news sites; that’s just a change of medium. (That is, unless a bunch of people who weren’t getting news from anywhere started using the Internet during that time.) It’s often through extended social interaction that we get various forms of polarization, and social media offers more opportunities for that. And indeed, Pew’s social media use data lines up well with the hypothesis that growth of social media use positively correlates with polarization of policy preferences in the US.
But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
Seems like I’ve tripped this clause but I don’t really get it. Did that count as the sort of argument you were looking for?
Also, I don’t have a strong position either way on this, just pointing out what I perceived as a weakness in what seems like an otherwise good argument.
ETA: Just noticed skeptical_lurker’s comment.
Upvoted for question dissolution and thorough analysis; one thing: A binary Internet-use question seems like a bad metric; people were primarily consumers in the past, now everyone is producing content, or actively sharing the content that others have produced. Furthermore, a lot of people on this thread seem to be talking about Twitter and Facebook; even if everyone’s using the word Internet, clearly they mean social media (blogs included), and that’s what we should be talking about anyway. We wouldn’t expect considerably more polarization from people switching their consumption habits from TV and newspaper to big Internet news sites; that’s just a change of medium. (That is, unless a bunch of people who weren’t getting news from anywhere started using the Internet during that time.) It’s often through extended social interaction that we get various forms of polarization, and social media offers more opportunities for that. And indeed, Pew’s social media use data lines up well with the hypothesis that growth of social media use positively correlates with polarization of policy preferences in the US.
Seems like I’ve tripped this clause but I don’t really get it. Did that count as the sort of argument you were looking for?
Also, I don’t have a strong position either way on this, just pointing out what I perceived as a weakness in what seems like an otherwise good argument.