Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro write,
If access to the Internet or social media use is a primary driver of political polarization among the U.S. electorate, we would expect to see greater changes in polarization among young adults (18–39) than among the old (65 and older). The data, however, tell a different story. The change in our index of political polarization in the past 20 years is twice as large for the old as for young adults, despite the older group using social media and obtaining political information online at substantially lower rates.
Interesting. Some possibilities:
1. Their constructed index of polarization may be more sensitive to picking up changes in the elderly than in young people.
2. Cable news may be the most polarizing medium these days, and old people probably watch more cable news.
3. We can look forward to a less polarized politics once the crotchety old people die off. (I don’t believe this.)
Speaking of crotchety, here comes another rant against politics on social media.
I grant that all forms of media can be sensationalist. The term “sensationalist” was first applied to newspapers.
But it seems to me that what we call social media cannot be anything but sensationalist. When it comes to political issues, the sensation that people cannot resist is anger validation. Cable news has provided that for years. I am willing to believe that cable news, rather than social media, is the biggest contributor to our anger validation addiction. (I never see cable news, except at the airport, which is not often.) But other media seem to have degenerated to the Cable News level. Using social media, the ordinary person tries to imitate the worst of the talking-heads smackdowns.
As I have said before, although I am “on” Twitter, I do not use it. The software echoes my blog posts to twitter in some fashion.
And as far as Facebook goes, I am about as thrilled to see politics there as I am at seeing it in pro football. The difference is that I had mostly tuned out pro football years ago, and I have only recently dialed back my time spent on Facebook.
Complex problems are best discussed in slow conversations. In a slow conversation, many people contribute. People think out loud. Contrary viewpoints are expressed, if not by representatives of those viewpoints, then by people making a sincere attempt to play devil’s advocate, not to paint other points of view as stupid or deranged.
Blogging for me is part of a slow conversation, not a rapid-fire reaction to the topic du jour. Most of my posts are riffs on other people’s thoughts.
When blogging first got going, there were “trackbacks” that encouraged thick conversations. That might have been the golden age of blogging. The trackback feature was killed by spammers, who polluted it. There was comment spam, too, but there are effective programs to filter it out. If somebody developed a filter for trackback spam, it was too late to save the trackback feature.
I might suggest that one format that has not been completely corrupted by the contemporary media environment is the book review. I think that people who write book reviews tend to to take their time thinking about what they are going to write. And writing about a book means writing about a topic that has a longer shelf life than what you find on cable news.
Let’s say one is a little skeptical of these results, or the framing or spin on these results. So one clicks through to try to get the full pdf at the National Academy of Sciences and one sees that one can: puchase two days of access to this one article (not any of its citations) on one device for $10, or one week of access on one device to anything from the National Academy (but no citations anywhere else), for $25.
This kind of thing happens all the time. Yes, there’s (illegal) SciHub, and drafts and preprints, and that kind of thing. But the reality is that there just isn’t going to be a robust conversation about these topics when scrutiny is annoying and costs a lot of money for those without the benefit of institutional access. Or if there is a conversation about it between people with access, then for any spectators trying to figure out whether claims are valid, there is no free way to look at the facts, or perhaps there is no legal way for the conversants to copy and paste enough of the facts.
And frankly, the “has institutional access” filter is also one that implies other filtering for conformity and certain social and professional pressures as well.
In a legal context, it is now generally considered unethical for a prosecutor to fail to hand over any piece of evidence or information relevant to the defense to the accussed’s counsel for free, or in civil suit, to fail to honor discovery production requests.
That’s what it feels like trying to follow a “conversation” about claims regarding research results without institutional access. It feels like it is just a little unethical to put on a public case without everything about the case being out in the open even for non-institutionally-filtered people to scrutinize.
The “polarization” is happening because the prior dominant Christian Free Market Capitalist cultural “ideals”, imperfectly realized, have been replaced by a new culture. The old culture emphasized free speech, and free thought, and freedom to disagree.
The new culture, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and usually anti-American, is also anti-free speech. No freedom to disagree — either supporting every politically correct position, or else you’re Evil (tho there is no God); and anything bad done to Evil folks is ok…
This is what happens with Social Justice Despots.
From the paper “The 2016 election was the first time that the Republican vote share among the low Internet group was equal to or larger than that among the high Internet group for two of the measures.”
Your 3 options are incomplete:
4. As the SJ Despots successfully use the internet to shame & blame & get fired those conservatives who politely disagree, the obvious unjustness of the SJD mob causes the normal folk to be more against the Democrats who are led by the SJDs. They don’t need to use the internet directly to see the lack of justice.
This can be considered one of the indirect methods mentioned in the paper, tho it’s not clear if the full paper includes this.
#2 without question.
From the article:
“The data, however, tell a different story. The change in our index of political polarization in the past 20 years is twice as large for the old as for young adults, despite the older group using social media and obtaining political information online at substantially lower rates.”
From history:
“Fox News Channel, American cable television news and political commentary channel launched in 1996. The network operated under the umbrella of the Fox Entertainment Group, the film and television division of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox (formerly News Corporation).”
I have two children in the younger age group (25 and 26) and I think what you’re missing about social media use amongst them is that politics is at most 1% of what they chatter about. Us parents tend to see the web as another broadcast medium, and so we tend to see people who have something they want to say to a broad audience. Often we filter on the hashtags about news that matters, which (for us) would be politics. When we talk about our hobbies, love, family, that mini-argument we had with the wife before work, we do that in person. The water cooler. A beer after work. Maybe on the phone with people we’re close to, but it’s still voice.
The 99% of what younger people do on the web is all that other stuff. It’s the smalltalk, the fluff, the little heartbeats of being connected. Their political engagement doesn’t go much past “liking” a meme that seems kinda right, and then blink, they’re onto something else. If you can even get enough time to convince them there’s something wrong with that meme, you’ll a get a shrug and “whatever” at most.
My son and I can have a substantial conversation through IM, but usually only if it’s something important that he wants my help with (a major purchase, a problem at work). Chatting online with my daughter is limited to a few words and lots of exclamation marks.
If my son and I want to really get into a deep conversation about politics we do it over a bottle of whiskey. He’s very different than most of his friends in that way. If I sent my daughter an “important” paragraph about politics via email I’d get no reply. She’s the normal one.
These young people are not polarized; they just don’t care. We only see the very few, really loud ones that do. Those loud SJWs think they have “followers” but what they really have is a bunch of ephemeral +1s. A twitch Destiny 2 streamer and the reality star du jour have 1000x the attention and mindshare.
In general, young people are less political and they become cranky old people in 4 decades so it is reasonable to assume the polarization will not stop. I think a lot of the older polarization is simply the old generation is general “Get Off My Lawn” translated into politics. And old people always have a degree of “Get Off My Lawn” and walking to school uphill in 5 feet of snow both ways.
1) I think the two big changes in the 1990s was the fall of the Soviet Empire and conservative talk radio. I remember 1980s conservative was very reasonable in their arguments but Rush Limbaugh changed all that after the Clinton 1992 election. Also, we have to remember there less avenues to discuss opinions in yesteryear.
2) “I grant that all forms of media can be sensationalist.” Is that another word for capitalism working? The media company with the most clicks wins!!!
3) We have to remember this is the first generation that could get so much national and international news at their fingertips. A lot of stories 3 decades ago, say the Saudia arrest of political figures, would have never reached my parents radar and we can read loads of it.
4) I still say the problem with wage stagnation is the average person is not benefitting from economic growth. We felt less polarized in 1997 or 2005 because everybody was working themselves to death for a bigger house.
5) I suspect the most unusual aspect of the current economic growth and the people left behind, that this is the first in our history when the population most left behind are the WWC Rust Belt and not minority populations. There is still a lot of nostalgia for the local economy and community of 1960 that is becoming forgotten today.
5) I think there is weird reality making more people cranky is the labor supply is very limited and employers really having issues with this. (I suspect a lot of labor supply in skilled working class is getting short with the aging work force and they dont know how to increase it without higher wages.)
The study provides no evidence for the effect of social media on polarization. It assumes that, ceteris paribus, young people and old people are equally politically polarized. This seems unlikely to me. I would guess that old people are now and have always been more politically polarized than young people, that people increase in political polarization as they age.
If you wanted to prove it with data like this, you’d need to compare how politically polarized the subset of these age groups that follow the most social media are vs. those who follow it less. That is, subdivide the 65+ people who use a lot of social media to those who don’t and see if they differ in their political polarization; and then do the same with the 18-39 crowd. This wouldn’t be perfect evidence, since you’d still have the possibility of reverse causation (that being more political polarized causes you to spend more time on social media), but it’d provide better evidence.