Guess what? Internet users don’t insulate themselves in information echo chambers. “Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions.” That’s the news from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, done in tandem with the University of Michigan School of Information.
My first reaction was to say, “Big deal,” since Internet users tend to have higher education levels than the general population, and that would explain at least some of their interest in different points of view. But Pew compared groups with similar demographic characteristics and still found a variation.
In other words, Cass Sunstein is wrong. Millions of people aren’t using the Internet simply to listen to “louder echoes of their own voices,” as he wrote in his book Republic.com.
Dig a little deeper into the data and you’ll find some nuggets. Like this one: people with high-speed Internet connections at home (42% of all Internet users) seek out a more varied mix of news sources than people with dial-up connections, or non-Internet users. And they rely on the net almost as much as they rely on newspapers for their campaign news.
Sobering to also note that as June 2004, the date of the study, three-quarters of all Americans say that TV is their main source of campaign news, with 38% saying newspapers and just 15% saying the net. There’s been a shift since 2000, when 86% said TV was their main source and just 7% cited the net.
Most intriguing: While 22% said they prefer to get their news from sources that share their political point of view, and 50% said they wanted sources that don’t have a point of view [try to find one!], 18% said they preferred sources that challenge their political point of view.
This all reminds me of something Steven Johnson, the author of Emergence, said to me earlier this year. “Before the web came along, people weren’t at all reading their opposition. Now all that stuff is one-click away. I’m reading far more National Review Online that I would have before.”
Indeed, the very act of linking, even when done as part of an attack on something you disagree with, has the effect of inviting the reader to go discover for themselves what that opposing viewpoint may be.