Interactive Environmental Journalism

Does reading news online narrow the perspective of users?

At Langdon Winner's talk this evening, Frank asked whether the Internet might not be a narrowing, undemocratic influence because it enables people to encounter only the ideas that they already support. He and Langdon discussed the use of personalized, "mynews" type sites that Langdon says prevent the kind of serendiptious encounters with the local community that readers of newspapers regularly encounter.

It's an important question that we'll continue to grapple with in our program. Even our conversation about the mytahoe.com vs. ourtahoe.com is a variation of this concern.

The exchange reminded me of a debate crystallized in Cass Sunstein's book republic.com. James Fallows wrote a review of Sunstein's book in The New York Review of Books in 2002. I thought he made some important arguments when considering the evils of the "Daily Me" as Sunstein referred to it:

The filtering available on Internet sites is primitive compared to the filters, cushions, and blinders that surround us the rest of the time. The patterns Sunstein warns about—a lack of shared experience and the balkanization of Americans according to class, region, religion, and ethnicity—are real and worrisome enough. But the Internet is a trivial source of the problem— let's say one thousandth as important as the educational system, from school districts with their unequal funding to the faulty system of college admissions. Or residential patterns. Or who marries whom. Or tax policy. Or the existing broadcast media, which let you drive coast to coast listening to nothing but right-wing talk radio or NPR. Or cable TV, with one channel showing only bass fishermen and another showing only success-motivation seminars. Or patterns of commuting, which have evolved from buses to cars, and remove people from accidental contact with others. You could un-invent the Internet and still have every problem Sunstein fears.

Fallows goes on to talk about the nature of using the Internet -- how often one thing leads to another leads to another:

Compared with most other indoor activities, time with the Internet is less filtered, more open-ended, more likely to lead to surprises. If you read a book or magazine, you usually keep reading. If you watch a video, you watch. But if you start looking up information on Web sites, you almost never end up where you expected. There's a link to something you'd never heard of before, some news you hadn't known was interesting. It's not the same as walking to a new part of town, but it's a lot more surprising than listening to the radio. The feeling is similar to that of going through library stacks—if there were no dust and you could instantly zoom from floor to floor.

Perhaps we can think of ways to test this question in our own work...looking at traffic statistics on our Web projects and by talking to people about their on and offline patterns of conversation and information.

posted by donica @ 11:45 PM