Online Political Content and Its Audience

As Hindman details in The Myth of a Digital Democracy, the Internet does not have a significant effect on the democratization process. In his book, Hindman argues that politics is a relatively low concern of the American public, generally speaking, that most users do not search well and rely on top results in search engine rankings, that there is a power-law distribution online, in terms of traffic and links, which results in in highly concentrated web traffic to political sites, and that successful political bloggers are not a good representation of the general public as they all tend to be highly educated and belong to upper middle-class.

Although I can agree with Hindman that today’s social state is more concentrated with celebrities and entertainment, and that viewership of political sites is about 1%. However, there still exists the potential for political activism as witnessed by recent events. Social networking sites challenge Hindman’s idea about the communication of democracy on the Internet. The Arab Spring movement in the Middle East was organized on Facebook. Organizations such as MoveOn.org have garnered volunteers and have encouraged the public to sign and deliver petitions to their government officials, which deal with human rights and civil liberties. The Occupy Wall Street movement has also been organized with the help of the Internet. So the potential exists, however, it is up to the general public to do their part.

Hindman also uses the idea of “Googlearchy” to support his argument that the Internet does not foster democracy as Google’s algorithm called “PageRank” uses the number of hyperlinks to a given site to determine its ranking or visibility on its search engine results page. As Hindman illustrates, the Internet operates according to the power-law distribution, where a few popular sites receive the most links, and a small set receive the most online visitors.

Another contributing factor to the low viewership of political sites is that political blogs and their bloggers are not a good representation of the general population. As Hindman writes, these political bloggers are almost all highly education and are members of upper middle-class. They may not necessarily cater to all that are searching for content that affects them more directly than others. These could include rights that affect working class families, and other civil liberties issues.

I believe it is difficult to assess how society will behave. I do agree with Hindman on the fact that there could exist a greater interest in current events at home and abroad. However, I would not go as far in stating that the Internet does not foster political activism as I have witnessed it occur, as described above. There does exist the potential, especially with the explosion of social networking sites in the recent years. However, it is ultimately up to each individual to seek out information about what is going on in the world, and being inspired to influence change, by engaging in online political activism, for example.