If the ideological fragmentation and segregation are increasingly prominent in the real world, this phenomenon does not correspond to the virtual world. Internet users are "vagabonds ideological, far more curious than you think, the constant search the confrontation of ideas, want to know what happens on the other side of the fence politically and not afraid to explore sites that contain opposing views. And the Internet is far from being closed and segregated as often tends to believe.
I'm not sure that I agree, but say it is an interesting research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, professors of the Chicago School of Business Booth *, which investigates how the use of information over the Internet is marked by a sort of ideological segregation "and compares the results with the segregation of traditional media and interpersonal interactions.
This study sheds new light on the effect "case resonance "in which our beliefs are strengthened hearing or read similar ideas. If you like to find confirmation of our preconceived ideas, the Internet, which allows you to customize the selection of online media and therefore select only the stories we're interested, could isolate us behind our beliefs and, ultimately, produce a kind of "bias" of society into distinct groups.
In the publication "ideological segregation on and offline" Gentzkow and Shapiro demonstrate the opposite. According to the two researchers, there is no convincing evidence that the Internet progressively accentuate the ideological segregation. In contrast, the study shows that segregation of ideological Internet users is lower than the readership of national newspapers. In addition, that trade on the Internet are much more ideologically diverse than other traditional forms of association, as the discussions in the workplace or in church. It 'much more likely to encounter people with opposing ideas on the Internet that walking in their neighborhood.
But the most important finding is that the majority of internet users regularly visit sites generalist (or non-politically oriented) such as AOL or Yahoo News and also visit those sites that do not necessarily reflect their ideologies. Even when they go to other sites, have a habit of visiting those where they meet very different people from them.
Research Gentzkow and Shapiro, which incorporates the analysis tools used to measure racial segregation in the United States, focuses primarily on the behavior of individuals on the Internet. Starting from a sample of newspapers and websites, the researchers measured the size of every conservative online journal, ie, the proportion of readers who say they are cool "conservative." As a result, have given a conservative value to the proportion of each media source of information visited. For example, if the site is the only online newspaper nytimes.com consulted by the reader, its exposure is defined by the conservative size of the site. If the reader consults in addition to also nytimes.com foxnews.com, its exposure will be equal to the average size of the conservative of the two sites.
Anna Masera
www.lastampa.it
