A Warm Virtual Cave?

Peter Beaumont, writing in the Guardian:

"All of which leads to an inevitable question - whether our new developing public discourse, largely mediated online, has made our conversation more open, democratic and accountable? Or, instead, more fragmented and poisonous? Among the pessimists has been the U.S. academic Cass Sunstein, who was early in proposing a more dystopian picture of how debate was being shaped online, noting a fundamental contradiction. 'New technologies', Sunstein has suggested, 'including the internet, make it easier for people to hear the opinions of like-minded but otherwise isolated others'.

Sunstein noted that while the internet was efficient in bringing together virtual communities of interest, it also encouraged participants 'to isolate themselves from competing views... [creating a] breeding ground for polarisation, potentially dangerous for both democracy and social peace. In other words, virtual communities, unlike physical communities that are under constant pressure to compromise, are at risk of a tendency to organise around confirmatory bias."

Read Beaumont's article here.

A fair point. I know some bloggers who read widely and make a point of recording the views of their opponents in a fair and even-handed way, but the Web makes it so easy to retreat into a warm virtual cave with people who think and feel like you do. The saving grace here is that blog comments at least allow people to debate various issues (even if the level of debate is often shrill and sometimes sub-literate).