Unit 3: Vocabulary from Readings 2

More than a decade ago the technology specialist, Nicholas Negroponte, prophesied the emergence of the Daily Me—a fully personalised newspaper.

They deliberated on controversial issues, such as whether the US should sign an international treaty to combat global warming and whether states should allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions.

The groups, not mixed, were screened to ensure members conformed to stereotypes.

The second reason is that when people find their views corroborated, they become more confident and so are more willing to be extreme.

The Daily Me leads inexorably also to the Daily Them.

Each year may put another loop in the newspaper's death spiral, but the overall consumption of news is on the rise, almost entirely thanks to the myriad online sources.

As Sunstein sees it, the Daily Me is the potential Achilles heel of democracy because of a phenomenon called group polarization: when like-minded people find themselves speaking only with one another, they get into a cycle of ideological reinforcement where they end up endorsing positions far more extreme than the ones they started with.

But, for the most part, it isn't a problem (for democracy anyway), since we routinely come into contact with so many people from so many different groups that the tendency toward polarization in one is at least somewhat tempered by our encounters with others.

Yet Sunstein is worried that group polarization on the Internet will prove far more pernicious.

The result, he claims, "will be serious obstacles not merely to civility but also to mutual understanding.”

For decades, progressive critics have complained about the anti-democratic influence of the mass media, and that newspapers present a selective and highly biased picture of the world, promoting pseudo-arguments that give the illusion of debate while preserving the status quo.

In fact, we have every reason to believe that as people migrate online, it will be to seek out sources of information that they perceive to be unbiased, and which give them news they can’t get anywhere else.