How We Choose What to Hear: Sources of News in the Digital Age

It seems an intuitive notion that more people are getting more of their news from the Internet. After all, many of us are on our computers consistently throughout the day, and without seeing any kind of data, we might be able to guess that this would lead to an increase in use of the Internet as a source of news. Now there are numbers to back up that assumption. A 2011 Pew Research poll reported that 41% of Americans now say they get most of their news online, and that figure rises to 65% among those 18-29 years old. We now have statistical evidence that supports our guess as to where Americans get their information, but what does this mean for democracy?

One important effect this has is that it lets us, to a certain extent, choose what news we do and do not want to hear. With the huge variety of sources found online, ranging from extremely liberal to very conservative, it is much easier to find a tone with which you already agree, creating the illusion that your point of view is the correct one. This can be detrimental to the democratic process of debate and dialogue in that it may stifle the perception of political contention. Services like Google News tend to facilitate this; Google records what articles you read and uses that information to guess what else you might be interested in. (They refer to this process as “personalization” of your news page.)

Fortunately, there is a solution. If we aware of the ways in which we tend to pick and choose our news from the Internet, we can consciously access a variety of different sources, thereby hearing views both similar and dissimilar to our own. Many of us already do this, and that is commendable, but the opposite habit is strikingly easy to fall into. While the Internet has done wonders for increasing our ease of communication and dissemination of news, it is important to acknowledge its potential for bias, and do our best to combat it while preserving the dialogue crucial to democracy.

Disclaimer: I speak as an individual, NOT on behalf of Common Cause Hawaii. All opinions are my own.