"The Myth of Digital Democracy" by Matthew Hindman
"The Myth of Digital Democracy" by Matthew Hindman
Princeton University Press | 2009 | ISBN: 0691137617 0691138680 9780691137612 9780691138688 9781400837496 | 198 pages | PDF | 1 MB
Princeton University Press | 2009 | ISBN: 0691137617 0691138680 9780691137612 9780691138688 9781400837496 | 198 pages | PDF | 1 MB
This is one of the first significant efforts to bring data to bear on the relationship between the internet and democracy. Author argues against the journalists and pundits who have made sweeping claims about the internet's transformative potential for democracy, and suggests that the new online bosses are not very different from the old ones.
This is a book about one aspects of online politics, namely who gets read and heard when it comes to online political debate, recommend to any reader interested in the relation between the internet and democratic values.
Contents
One: The Internet and the "Democratization" of Politics
Democratization and Political Voice
A Different Critique
Gatekeeping, Filtering, and Infrastructure
The Difference between Speaking and Being Heard
Two: The Lessons of Howard Dean
The Liberal Medium?
"Big Mo1" Meets the Internet
The Internet and the Infrastructure of Politics
The End of the Beginning
Three: "Googlearchy": The Link Structure of Political Web Sites
What Link Structure Can Tell Political Scientists
The Link Structure of Online Political Communities
Site Visibility and the Emergence of Googlearchy
The Politics of Winners-Take-All
Four: Political Traffic and the Politics of Search
The Big Picture
Traffic Demographics
Search Engines and (the Lack of) User Sophistication
What Users Search For
Search Engine Agreement
How Wide a Gate?
Five: Online Concentration
Barriers to Entry
Distribution, Not Production
Online Concentration
Comparative Data, Comparative Metrics
A Narrower Net
Six: Blogs: The New Elite Media
Blogs Hit the Big Time
Bloggers and the Media
So You Want to Be a Blogger
Blogger Census
Bloggers and Op-Ed Columnists
Rhetoric and Reality
Seven: Elite Politics and the "Missing Middle"
The Limits of Online Politics
A Narrower Net
Political Organizing and the Missing Middle
New Technology, Old Failures
Appendix: On Data and Methodology
Support Vector Machine Classifiers
Surfer Behavior and Crawl Depth
Hitwise's Data and Methodology
References
Index
with TOC BookMarkLinks