Does access to political information broaden or narrow online? It’s Complicated.
Do the information rich get richer and the like-minded get more similar?
Let me start with a story. A friend of mine . . . actually, not so much a friend as an offline-acquaintance-and-friend-on-facebook of mine . . . called Ben.
He’s an American immigrant and a “never-Hilary-ite” which means that, in the 2016 American Presidential election, he supported Bernie Sanders and his vision of a democratic socialist America, and detested Hillary Clinton as too far right and too much in the pockets of the capitalist elites.
Even though he was a Democrat he refused to vote for Clinton in the Presidential election. He would rather have Trump as President, even though he detested Trump even more than Clinton, because a Trump presidency would (in his opinion) force the Democratic party and American society in general to backlash against Trump and move to the left.
Ben is white, mid-twenties (I’m old enough to call that “young”), with middle-class parents and a good education, and with a digital subscription to the New York Times, a publication that has a reputation for excellent, unbiased journalism.
So that puts him squarely in the category of people who are generally called “information rich”.
And, being information rich, is probably how he came to move to the left and become a Bernie supporter, because he had access to information and opinions that were different from those he grew up with.
But he’s no longer information rich.
Some time after the Trump election victory, the New York Times hired a new, conservative, opinion columnist. They did this because they believe it’s important for people to read a range of opinions so they don’t fall into their own information bubble. A good reason, I thought.
Ben didn’t see it that way. He was furious. His rants about the New York Times giving a platform to right-wing views reverberated across my Facebook feed for days, as did his attempts to cancel his online subscription to the New York Times in protest.
So, now he’s someone who used to be information rich online, but now is “information poor” in that he refuses to access news sources that include — amongst a diversity of opinion — one person who has radically different views from his own.
That’s just one example of someone who was information rich becoming “like-minded”.
Of course, we have to avoid generalising to the entire population of the world just based on one person’s rants on my Facebook feed. But this example does suggest that the question about information rich and like-minded is a little more complicated.
It’s not just a matter of:
- Do the information rich get richer? Yes or no?
- Do the like-minded get more like-minded? Yes or no?
And more like a range of possibilities:
When people access the internet, they can access a narrower range of views or they can access a broader range of views.
Possibly (as suggested by the diagram) if you are like-minded in the offline world, you will bring this to the internet, and it will be easy to become like-minded on the internet. Similarly for the information rich, access to the internet may broaden their views even more.
But maybe that’s not the case. The diagram shows the arrows going both ways, so this is not necessarily a given that you will be the same online as you are offline. And, like Ben, you could start by accessing a broader range of views, and then get narrower, and this fluctuation between broad and narrow could potentially continue over your lifetime. Or perhaps not. Some people could stay at one end of the spectrum.
So, in my mind, the question should be:
- What factors influence whether access to political information is broadened or narrowed by access to the internet?
One of the factors could be:
- Information rich or like-minded when offline
Following on from Brundidge and Rice (2008, p153), others could include:
- Age
- Ideological polarity (like Ben, for example)
- Social ideology (conservatism in particular)
- Political knowledge
- Amount of offline political discussion
Following on from Mossberger (2008 pp175–176), other factors could be:
- Race or ethnicity
- Socio-economic status
- Gender
- Education
Psychological traits could also influence it, the most obvious being the trait of openness to experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience), most specifically:
- Preference for variety
- Intellectual curiosity
So, my answer to the question about whether or not the information-rich get richer and the like-minded more similar is that it’s really quite complicated, and probably multi-factorial.
Impact of digital divide
What I’ve discussed above doesn’t take into account the digital divide, where some people have no or limited access to the internet, and therefore don’t have access to either the diversity of information on the internet, or the opportunity to find an information bubble to reinforce a set of pre-existing or (as in Ben’s case) newfound opinions.
Again, I’d like to tell a story. My uncle Don — that’s my real-life uncle — had (before he passed away earlier this year at the age of 80) limited access to the internet.
Uncle Don lived rurally, so that probably limited the speed he could access, but he did use emails to keep in touch with friends and family. He lived in the Manawatu, with a daughter and two grandchildren in Palmerston North who he saw weekly, and a son and granddaughter in Blenheim who he saw a couple of times a year.
I know he would have like to see his son and granddaughter more often, but travel was difficult, so he relied on photos that his son occasionally emailed him.
I did suggest to him once, many years ago, that he set up a Facebook account because his son was constantly sharing pictures on Facebook, and that would be an easy way of seeing photos and keeping in touch.
He wasn’t interested. Not even in discussing it. So I don’t really know what his block was — whether he was afraid of having to learn how to do it (or of feeling inadequate if he found it too hard), or perhaps he had tried but the internet speed was too slow to make it worthwhile. But knowing Don and his advancing years, I suspect it just felt too difficult and he didn’t want to give it a go.
My experience with my uncle suggests three different digital divides in New Zealand. One is the rural divide, where internet access is slow for many rural residents. Another is the age divide, because the older you are the more difficult it is to learn new things.
But then my mother, who is the same age as my uncle, is an avid user of Facebook and the internet, and will use the internet to research and plan her international travel adventures (Kamchatka, Iran, Turkey, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu being recent adventures, and Antarctica being her next one, which is where she will be on her 81st birthday).
So, the third digital divide I see is the psychological one: “openness to experience”. It’s a psychological divide, an interest (or lack of interest) to explore the opportunities that both the offline and the online world provides.
And it is one of the factors that I suspect is important in influencing whether someone accesses a broad range of opinion online. Or not.
To what extent you believe youth, as digital natives, are in a different situation compared to other groups in society.
I’m not so keen on the term “digital native”. Certainly, young people access the internet at younger and younger ages. But, as Danah Boyd points out (2014: pp 13, 176, 179, 192, 195, 197) there is a huge variation in access, knowledge, experience, comfort, and “digital wisdom” among young people, and consequently I think it’s fair to assume that there are many older people who are more comfortable and more skilled online than many young people.
This view is supported by the statistics on internet access in New Zealand. In this data from 2012, there is very little difference in access among the under 45s (but very slightly lower for the youngest age group).
So, although there is a stark difference between the under 45s and the over 64s, there really isn’t much difference in the under 45s in their access to the internet.
And, as Boyd points out, young people use the internet differently from adults (Boyd 2014, p 3). They use it primarily for social purposes, but they can’t necessarily use it for anything else, for example, figuring out the accuracy of something they read on a website (Boyd 2014, pp 180–182).
When I look at my stepdaughters — ages 9, 12 and 14 — they show a high level of comfort with the internet. Even the 14 year-old, who has Down Syndrome, can navigate YouTube to find what she wants to watch, the 12 year-old navigates Instagram and Movitae, and the 9 year-old uses Google to research for school projects. How much they can do outside of that, I’m not sure. So, I don’t think they have a level of expertise that would normally be associated with being a native, but what they do have is that it’s comfortable. It’s a normal part of life.
It was never a normal part of life for my uncle.
So, in my experience, the biggest impact of age for my stepdaughters is that the psychological trait of “openness to experience” is not an issue for them. The internet is not a “new experience” that they have to be “open” to. It is as much a part of normal life as reading books was for my uncle.
So their access to the internet is not influenced by psychological openness, like it was for my uncle.
But how they use the internet will still be. Whether they are open to new experiences and new ideas, or whether they will seek those who are like-minded, will still come down to the same factors as everyone else.
So, whether the internet broadens or narrows their political views, well, that’s complicated. And probably multi-factorial.
References
D. Boyd, It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press, 2014.
J. Brundidge and R. E. Rice, “Political engagement online: Do the information rich get richer and the like-minded more similar?,” in Routledge handbook of Internet politics: Routledge, 2008, pp. 160–172.
K. Mossberger, “Toward digital citizenship: Addressing inequality in the information age,” in Routledge handbook of Internet politics: Routledge, 2008, pp. 189–201.
