Digital technologies and polarization
From newspapers to television, the different means through which people share knowledge and information, and their subsequent evolution, have played a major role in shaping peoples’ views (Shanahan et al. 1999, p. 2). With technological developments, we have reached an age where communication and information sharing has never been so fast and widespread. This moulding of communication by digital technologies has also affected international political discourse in a different set of ways, making them complementary to each other.
Henceforth, this paper will critically evaluate the impacts of digital technologies on international political communications, focusing on political polarisation as a ramification of digital technologies’ effect on political thinking. In the following pages it will be argued that digital technologies, through the creation of multiple news outlets (and the subsequent ability to choose from them) and algorithmic curation, is further polarising political views. Moreover, it will be suggested that this can have a menacing effect on society, weakening democracy and creating tribalistic dynamics.
Using this example, the positive and negative sides of the influence of digital technologies will be depicted through first, posing an introduction to the growth of dichotomies in political ideas and second, by deliberating in respect of the two identified causes of political polarisation. Starting with the multiplicity of news outlets and the capacity to choose from them, it will be depicted that this can fuel “echo chambers” that further radicalise and divide political thought (Sunstein 2009; Flaxman et al. 2016; Carothers and O’Donohue 2019). Concerning algorithmic curation, it will be delineated that the employment of this method, through personalisation, might create “filter bubbles” that constrain the deliberative character of social media platforms and therefore inhibit democratic debate (Conover et al. 2011; Pariser 2011; Zollo et al. 2015).
As a finishing note, this essay will provide a possible answer to mitigate the negative effects of digital technologies’ effect on society. In this context, the individual will be seen as the unit with most agency in respect of alleviating the effects of digital technologies in political polarisation. Not only this, but for the sake of transforming theory into praxis, this essay will also offer some guidance for governments on coping mechanisms for the impact of digital technologies in political polarisation, focusing on engagement with civil society through social media.
Digital technologies, since the rise of the Internet, have swiftly invaded the political landscape. With the multiplicity of digital platforms, such as social media, accompanied by the widespread use of mobile phones with the ability to connect people efficiently, the “online world” is now the space where people most commonly engage with each other (Klinger and Svenson 2015, p. 1245). It permits them to not only receive information and manage the sources from where it comes, but also provide it, whether it constitutes day-to-day tasks or ideas and judgments about pertinent topics (Gurevitch and Coleman 2009, pp. 167-168). The idea that the use of the Internet allows people to choose from an increasingly large variety of sources from where to receive their news from is a “double-edged” concept. On one side, people are granted and liberated with the freedom to choose. On the other, this inadvertently materialises in people choosing to get their information from sources more aligned with their ideology, heightening group polarisation (Bennet and Iyengar 2008, p. 720; Flaxman et al. 2016, p. 299).
Cass Sunstein (2002, p. 176) describes with clarity what group polarisation is and how it is manifested, defining it as a situation where “members of a deliberating group predictably move toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the members’ predeliberation tendencies”. This phenomenon can be translated into the present days by matching the “deliberating group” with the broad digital space, and the “members’ predeliberation tendencies” with the means through which a given person chooses to receive their information from, and the subsequent political thinking of those information providers. This way, Cass Sunstein’s (2002) preposition could be moulded to fit a situation where “members of the digital space predictably move towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the means through which the members choose to receive their ideas from, and their subsequent political thinking.”.
Political polarisation is not a new concept. From Darwent (1969) to Leo Kuper (1977), authors have been discussing this issue for a long period of time, the difference is, their focus was not on the impact of digital technologies in the phenomenon of polarisation. This essay, not extensively going through the proper political polarisation literature (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008; DiMaggio et al. 1996; Fiorina et al. 2005; Mutz 2002) that makes extensive remarks and categorisations, dividing political polarisation between its effects on the elites and on the masses (for example, Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; Layman et al. 2006), will make a broad assessment over the ways digital technologies might impact polarisation, addressing its effects on society. Additionally, given the fact that there is a prominent divide between scholars who believe in this polarisation and those who do not (Bennet and Iyengar 2008, p. 720; Mutz 2007, p. 223), this paper will provide some empirical data with the purpose of, to a degree, proving that there is in fact a growing trend in political polarisation with digital technologies as the possible link.
The set of ways digital technologies might affect political polarisation are various (Mutz 2007). In this context, two major themes that, for their sheer size, multiply into a broad array of sub premises are going to be discussed: (1) the multiplicity of news outlets and the ability to choose from them, and (2) algorithmic curation that personalises “content for users without any deliberate user choice” (Zuiderveen Borgesius et al. 2016).
The multiplicity of news outlets and the ability for users to pick from them can have serious impacts in the way people use digital technologies. For instance, in the years previous to the development of the digital world, it would be hard to find more radical, “overtly partisan sources of information”, while nowadays, “the task is relatively simple” (Bennett and Iyengar 2008, p. 720). This implies that people find it easier to get content related to their interests and therefore opt to receive information from those outlets. In this context, the conundrum is that the polarisation increases “when members identify themselves along some salient dimension” (Cass Sunstein 2002, p. 184). If people from both sides of the spectrum, – for example, right and left, – are finding more relatable sources to stick with, therefore increasing polarisation, then this must also mean that the gap between their diverging political views is widening. Adding to this calculation that the polarisation is especially greater “when the group is able to define itself by contrast to another group” (2002), indicates that the correlation between these dynamics might evolve into a downwards spiral effect heading towards massive political polarisation.
The fact that people are getting progressively radicalised through continuous exposure to their own beliefs’ and, in parallel, identifying themselves as opposition to the “other”, is similarly making them organise in a tribe-like manner. As posed by Kalb (cited in Robert Antonio 2000, p. 55) “[m]an forms tribes because he knows what he is by contrast with what he is not”. This tribalism might have serious consequences if one takes into account that the polarisation can lead “to violent acts” (Cass Sunstein 2002, p.184). Complementarily, the fuelling of these divisions is creating “echo chambers”, where “users interact primarily with” each other (Zollo et al. 2015 p. 1; Flaxman et al. 2016, p. 317). As posed by Sunstein (2009, p. 13), these agglomerations portray places where people are surrounded by their ideological self’s, “mainly listening to louder echoes of their own voices” and that “[a] situation of this kind is likely to produce far worse than mere fragmentation.”.
The path towards extremism also exerts other concerns. In a mutual constrictive relation, it is known that both the public and the media influence each other (Strömbäck 2008, p.237). As people tend to lean towards information compressed in the compounds of their belief system and thus personalising their experience, the media is also replicating this dynamic (Shapiro and Richard 1999, pp. 45-46). With the rise of populisms and “ideological rhetoric displayed on cable news, talk radio and the Internet”, the polarised, partisan media interact with the divided people (Prior 2013, p. 102). In this context, the conundrum is not to find “Who was born first, the chicken or the egg?”, but to identify the effects of the polarisation and its consequences.
In respect of the media, the tilt towards extremes gives birth to new features. For example, the news are becoming increasingly biased, with focus on online content, and this is partially owed to the fact that “firms will tend to distort information to make it conform with consumers’ prior beliefs.” (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006, p. 282). According to this logic, if peoples’ prior beliefs are increasingly polarised, the same will occur with reports coming from news outlets, therefore increasing the bias. As depicted here, the intertwinement between the media and the people should create a “snowball effect”, with the consequence of further polarisation in both realms. However, there are more implications to this. The fact that the bias is increasing, also translates into peoples’ distrust of the typical sources from where they get their news from (Bennett and Iyengar 2008, pp. 720-721). Both trust in mainstream media and its use have been declining (Sunstein 2001, p. 12; Pariser 2011, pp. 63-64), and the ramifications are materialised in the surge of alternative media (2008). From political podcasts to news websites, alternative media has definitely been rising (Waterson 2017), nonetheless, the empirical research on the dimension of its rise has been lacking (Holt et al. 2019).
A more positive note in comparison with the above comes from Gentzkow and Shapiro’s (2006) second finding. Although they mention the presence of incentives to misrepresent information, they simultaneously discovered that if the “consumers have access to a source that can provide ex post verification of the true state of the world, firms’ incentives to distort information are weakened” (2006, p. 282). Thus, their study suggests that having access to more sources increases the likelihood of accountability from “firms” tilting information towards a specific bias. This could also explain the rise of alternative media, since these types of channels are, theoretically, created in opposition to regular, mainstream media channels (Holt et al. 2019, pp. 860-861).
The development of partisanship in media, “a type of contemporary programming that eschews objectivity in favor of a particular point of view” (Druckman et al. 2018, p. 99), and its implications on the public has been proved to go beyond the ones consuming it. Druckman et al. (2018, p. 100) found empirical support for the hypothesis that “those who [do] not watch partisan media, but talked with those who did, formed opinions that matched those who only watched”. In this context, the role of “two-step communication flows” is emphasized as possibly being even “larger than the direct effects of exposure itself” (2018). These findings portray that previous studies may have underestimated the potential of the effect partisan media exerts in the public, since it shows that its implications might disseminate with astonishing efficiency through, for example, friendly discussions.
Shifting ahead, algorithmic curation is another way digital technologies are shaping peoples’ views and, possibly, polarising them. The use of search engines and social networks that “increasingly personaliz[e] content through machine-learning models” have the capacity to create “’filter bubbles’ in which algorithms inadvertently amplify ideological segregation by automatically recommending content” related to peoples’ views (Flaxman et al. 2016, p. 299). “Filter bubbles” constitute a threat to “functioning democracies”, since they might mitigate the deliberative character of platforms such as social media (2016). According to this analogy, the method applied in personalising information has the capacity to undermine social media’s role as a tool for free debate in the public sphere. Much like Habermas (1991, pp. 31-56) spoke of the “institutions of the public sphere”, mentioning the places where people rationally debated each other, in equal standards, not constrained by their social status, social media should also play a corresponding role. If algorithmic curation pushes relatable content in your direction, “watch[ing] and learn[ing] which pieces of content you interact with” (Pariser 2011, pp. 64-65), it is therefore creating limitations on the content you see and possibly shielding you from opposing views, enhancing digital technologies’ effect on polarising political views and, furthermore, harming democracy (Conover et al. 2011, p. 89).
In a different perspective, understating the role of algorithmic curation, Bakshy et al. (2015, p. 1131) found that social media (in this case, Facebook) exposes “individuals to at least some ideologically crosscutting viewpoints”, stating that the individuals are the units holding the power to expose themselves to other perspectives. Nonetheless, the problem is that, as proposed here, the first issue digital technologies’ pose to the public, namely the ramifications of the multiplicity of information providers, polarises people to the extent that they enter the “echo chamber”. According to this line of thought, both the multiplicity of news outlets and the algorithmic curation act as polarising agents, leaving the public with little room to escape the effects of the “echo chamber” and the “filter bubble”. As a counter-example, Conover et al. (2011, p. 95) discovered that political interaction on Twitter, primarily concerning the “retweet function”, works in a highly partisan way, and that the “[t]he fractured nature of political discourse seems to be worsening”.
An additional support for the argument that the individuals can be positively influenced by social media comes from Messing and Westwood (2016). The authors emphasize the “socialization of internet” as “a venue that promotes exposure to news from politically heterogenous individuals” (2016, p. 1043). They focus on the ability social media has to feature social endorsements as a path towards lessening “partisan selective exposure” and suggest that polarisation should decrease in consonance with the diversification of sources (2016, p. 1058). Likewise, the authors pose the chance that the power to control information exposure might, above all, still remain in the hands of the individual (2016).
The role of algorithmic curation in the use of search engines has also been cause for discussion. Hannak et al. (2013, p. 527) study, mentioning in the beginning Pariser’s (2011) concern about how during “the Egyptian revolution, different users searching for ‘Tahrir Square’ received either links to news reports of protests” or “to travel agencies”, goes on to show how your geographical area influences search results, widening the scope of the “filter bubble” to the geographical realm (fuelling further research, for example, Smets et al. 2019).
There is yet another issue raised by algorithmic curation. The fact that it acts like an intelligent personalisation filter, learning and memorising what content is the most viewed, materialises not only in “changing [peoples’] experience of news, [but also in] changing the economics that determine what stories get produced” (Pariser 2011, p. 79). The economic side of information broadcasting is therefore shaped into where people click and what they share the most, thus making content be created “in response to audience insight” (2011). This not only puts the Journalists Deontological Code in check, but also foments the propagation of news that have literally no palpable purpose, such as “Angeles Times’ top story in 2007” concerning “an article about the world’s ugliest dog” (2011). Following this context, digital technologies’ impact on political communication through the use of algorithmic curation, might embody something even worse than political polarisation, namely, the gradual evaporation and side lining of all meaningful content.
A positive remarque from the intermingling of economy and news production is that, while the demonisation of the other ideological side might increase revenue, it also entails that articles that are able to please both opposing poles of the spectrum are strengthened (Pariser 2011, p. 70). This suggests that there is a role for news that can unite people more than divide them, possibly enhancing the odds for proper journalism, given the fact that news that are more relevant to the majority of people are more lucrative (2011).
Whether the multiplicity of news outlets (and the opportunity to choose from them) and/or algorithmic curation act as polarising agents or not, the fact is, that for example, in American society, political views have never been so polarised. Pew Research Center addressing “Political Polarization in the American Public” (2014) and “The Partisan Divide on Political Values” (2017) shows that Republicans and Democrats are not only “more divided than ever on ideological lines” but also that animosity towards each other has been growing deeper. The fact that this Pew’s analysis shows the growth of the ideological divide in the past twenty years, indicates that there must be some contemporary force driving the polarisation of ideas. Similarly, Carothers and O’Donohue (2019) in “Democracies Divided” depict a world tendency towards political polarisation in a variety of states. Making a “quick global tour highlight[ing] how pervasive polarization is among democracies today and how serious its effects frequently are” (2019, p. 2), the authors identify the ramifications of “severe polarization” and mention how pernicious this path towards tribalism can be.
Through the course of this paper, it has been displayed how digital technologies might impact peoples’ political views. Starting with the multiplicity of news outlets and the ramifications that stem from this, it has been portrayed that the possibility of “echo chambers” are a real threat. People tend to surround themselves with similar views and in opposition to the “other”, which can induce tribalistic behaviour, dividing society in blocks. The algorithmic curation employed by social media and search engines additionally radiates the potential to generate “filter bubbles” that can undermine social media’s role as a deliberation platform where debate can occur freely and benefit democracy.
Digital technologies’ worldwide impact on political communication has been seen here as an instrument for polarisation. The optimistic side of this is that the individual seems to be the unit with the ability to control its exposure to information. It is the individual who has the agency to choose what he wants to see and can, therefore, opt to expose himself to crosscutting viewpoints. Even if people tilt towards their ideologies and algorithmic curation is further inducing them to watch relatable content, that does not withhold peoples’ power of choice. In the end, digital technologies provide the public with limitless options – it is in the power of the individual to choose.
On the realm of state and governmental intervention, this essay argues that, for the present, public policy should not be directly impacting the dynamics created by algorithmic curation and the multiplicity of outlets. Public regulatory measures would create a dangerous precedent that could be exploited for infringements on freedom of expression, and thus, backfiring. In order to mitigate the role of digital technologies on political polarization, this essay suggests governments to act focusing on two strategies. The first one is making their policies more easily digestible to the public, engaging more with citizens, and increasing transparency. Governmental policies are too often shrouded in a mist of complex wordings and frameworks completely foreign to the general public. This can, in turn, lead to different interpretations and facilitate antithetical reports. Governments should therefore engage more with the public, making use of digital technologies as a resource and explaining policies in plain terms, alleviating the spread of disinformation. More public engagement can also materialize in governmental figures participating in the more successful national podcast, for regular citizens to see them as people and not only as politicians. The second strategy would be investing in a team of social media experts to carefully observe online dynamics and publish information accordingly. This can translate into a real-life example as such: 1) Government launches new infrastructure plan; 2) Social media experts team identifies increased negative coverage implying the infrastructure plan is too focused on big cities, neglecting rural areas; 3) Government publishes on social media a detail explanation on how the infrastructure plan will help rural areas. Following these two strategical avenues would result in more engagement with civil society and provide a mechanism for governments to counteract the impact digital technologies have on political views.
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