Riders on the Storm

[Commentary] Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have measured ideological segregation on the Internet.

They took methodologies that have been used to identify racial segregation, and they tracked how people of different political views move around the Web.

The methodology is complicated, but can be summarized through a geographic metaphor. Think of the Fox News site as Casper (WY). If you visited and shook hands with the people reading the site, you'd be very likely to be shaking hands with a conservative. The New York Times site, they suggest, is like Manhattan (NY). If you shook hands with other readers, you'd probably be shaking hands with liberals. The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside.

According to the study, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times's site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users. But the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News. But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck's Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times's Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web. It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they're not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association -- like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You're more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood. This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They're not burrowing down into comforting nests. They're cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.

If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it's probably not the Internet that's causing it.