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Ideological Segregation Online and Offline
- _delirium 17y agoIntriguing result. The conventional wisdom is that the internet makes political groupthink worse, on the theory that while RL requires people to mix with lots of people around them, the internet makes it easy to self-select into echo chambers. The study seems to find the opposite. One guess is that the internet actually mixes people more easily, due to the low barriers in hopping from site to site; whereas IRL, many people tend to live in areas that are generally "conservative" or generally "liberal", and mixing between them is much harder.
- hga 17y agoExactly. I have retired back to my home in deep Red State America (SW Missouri), and I interact with local liberals on blogs and the local paper.