
Ideological Segregation Online and Offline - shrikant
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1588920
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_delirium
Intriguing result. The conventional wisdom is that the internet makes
political groupthink worse, on the theory that while RL requires people to mix
with lots of people around them, the internet makes it easy to self-select
into echo chambers. The study seems to find the opposite. One guess is that
the internet actually mixes people more easily, due to the low barriers in
hopping from site to site; whereas IRL, many people tend to live in areas that
are generally "conservative" or generally "liberal", and mixing between them
is much harder.

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hga
_Exactly_. I have retired back to my home in _deep_ Red State America (SW
Missouri), and I interact with local liberals on blogs and the local paper.

