Group Think

The explo­sion of online mate­ri­als has two, some­what con­tra­dic­tory effects. The scope of avail­able infor­ma­tion expands, remark­ably so; but as a con­se­quence, the infor­ma­tion needs to be fil­tered some­how, and the fil­ter is either reverse chrono­log­i­cal order or popularity:

Many Inter­net users cus­tomize their con­sump­tion of news sources and other infor­ma­tion in a way that fos­ters polar­iza­tion. This, it could be argued, has ele­ments both of the nar­row­ing effect and the long tail. Amer­i­cans seek out sources that reflect their per­sonal beliefs, con­sis­tent with Anderson’s vision. But, akin to the nar­row­ing Evans observes, large groups — lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives — con­verge on dif­fer­ent ref­er­ence points, result­ing in mutu­ally unrec­og­niz­able ver­sions of real­ity. The com­mon les­son of all of these phe­nom­ena is to be cog­nizant that the tools we use affect us in ways we may not fully appre­ci­ate. We should always be search­ing, the find­ings sug­gest, for new ways to search.