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Did Blogs Start “Polarization”? No….

An amusing article, from Gene Lyons, which was reprinted in the Northwest Arkansas News [1] this morning…

It’s no exaggeration to say that the establishment media’s initial response to the blogosphere was panic. The idea of mere citizens talking back to the press was unsettling to Washington media celebrities. Pundits who’d exhibited no qualms about the sordid imaginings of, say, American Spectator or The Wall Street Journal editorial page recoiled in horror at online mockery. It was laugh-out-loud funny to see a Washington Post reporter infamous for treating Kenneth Starr’s backstairs leaks like holy writ make a show of pretending that the now-defunct Web site mediawhoresonline. com had accused her of prostitution. How the system had always worked was this: They dished it out, everybody else had to take it. Now that many print and broadcast outlets feature Web logs—blogs—of their own, it’s no longer common to hear the word “blogger” pronounced with utter disdain. Even so, competition from the groundlings still provokes unease. The latest high-minded worrier is a University of Chicago law professor and sometime politico, Cass R. Sunstein.

A Justice Department official during the Carter and Reagan administrations, Sunstein has written a book called “Republic. com 2. 0,” essentially arguing that the Internet’s “echo chamber effect” is responsible for increased political polarization and declining civility. In an interview with salon. com, he said that social scientists find that when people talk only to those who agree with them, their views become more extreme.

I’m sure that’s what some steam would like us to think …but it’s not true.

I would suggest to you that the repeated election of Ronald Reagan prior to the vast majority of what has come to be known as talk radio, and prior certainly to the Internet age, is an indication that the polarization was already there… As was, not inconsequentially, leftist bias in the then existing media, which counseled us that the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust were we to elect Ronald Reagan. Our continued existence would seem to provide evidence as to who was right and who was wrong on that score.

rack2.jpg [2]I submit that the avenues of communication that have opened up, (Blogs, talkradio, email groups, and so on) are not the proximate cause of the political polarization in America as Sunstein claims, but rather opened up as a response to it.  Technology is exactly that; technology.  It may induce minor alterations in the way people communicate.  But it does not induce change in what they think.  The process that Sunstein is describing is reinforcement, not creation.  To reinforce something, it must already exist.

It seems clear to me that Sunstein hasn’t really thought this matter through.  When this lack is held up against his politics, I would take it as evidence that he lacks the ability to do so.

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