The Things People Say - Rumors in an age of unreason., by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker (Nov 2)
This is a most disturbing article. Just because we think the Internet promotes dissemination of information to create a better informed and less biased electorate, doesn't mean it does. This article in reviewing “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done” by Cass R Sunstein shows how far we are from that. The opposite is more the truth - our technologies are entrenching people more in their beliefs and views.
Partly this is because it is easy 1) to not read news at all, and 2) to read what we want by setting filters. This will lead to "group polarization".
There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so outlandish that he will not find other believers on the Web. “Views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities,” Sunstein observes. Racists used to have to leave home to meet up with other racists (or Democrats with other Democrats, or Republicans with Republicans); now they need not even get dressed in order to “chat” with their ideological soul mates.Posted by Gwen at October 26, 2009 11:58 AM“It seems plain that the Internet is serving, for many, as a breeding group for extremism, precisely because like-minded people are deliberating with greater ease and frequency with one another,” Sunstein writes. He refers to this process as “cyberpolarization.”