Is the Internet democratizing American politics? Do political Web sites and blogs mobilize inactive citizens and make the public sphere more inclusive? The Myth of Digital Democracy reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse but in fact empowers a small set of elites--some new, but most familiar. Matthew Hindman argues that, though hundreds of thousands of Americans blog about politics, blogs receive only a miniscule portion of Web traffic, and most blog readership goes to a handful of mainstream, highly educated professionals. He shows how, despite the wealth of independent Web sites, online news audiences are concentrated on the top twenty outlets, and online organizing and fund-raising are dominated by a few powerful interest groups. Hindman tracks nearly three million Web pages, analyzing how their links are structured, how citizens search for political content, and how leading search engines like Google and Yahoo! funnel traffic to popular outlets.
He finds that while the Internet has increased some forms of political participation and transformed the way interest groups and candidates organize, mobilize, and raise funds, elites still strongly shape how political material on the Web is presented and accessed. The Myth of Digital Democracy. debunks popular notions about political discourse in the digital age, revealing how the Internet has neither diminished the audience share of corporate media nor given greater voice to ordinary citizens.
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Chapter One: The Internet and the "Democratization" of Politics 1 Democratization and Political Voice 4 A Different Critique 8 Gatekeeping, Filtering, and Infrastructure 12 The Difference between Speaking and Being Heard 16 Chapter Two: The Lessons of Howard Dean 20 The Liberal Medium? 21 "Big Mo'" Meets the Internet 26 The Internet and the Infrastructure of Politics 27 The End of the Beginning 34 Chapter Three: "Googlearchy": The Link Structure of Political Web Sites 38 What Link Structure Can Tell Political Scientists 41 The Link Structure of Online Political Communities 45 Site Visibility and the Emergence of Googlearchy 54 The Politics of Winners-Take-All 56 Chapter Four: Political Traffic and the Politics of Search 58 The Big Picture 60 Traffic Demographics 67 Search Engines and (the Lack of) User Sophistication 68 What Users Search For 70 Search Engine Agreement 78 How Wide a Gate? 80 Chapter Five: Online Concentration 82 Barriers to Entry 83 Distribution, Not Production 86 Online Concentration 90 Comparative Data, Comparative Metrics 91 A Narrower Net 99 Chapter Six: Blogs: The New Elite Media 102 Blogs Hit the Big Time 103 Bloggers and the Media 105 So You Want to Be a Blogger 113 Blogger Census 118 Bloggers and Op-Ed Columnists 125 Rhetoric and Reality 127 Chapter Seven: Elite Politics and the "Missing Middle" 129 The Limits of Online Politics 131 A Narrower Net 133 Political Organizing and the Missing Middle 139 New Technology, Old Failures 141 Appendix: On Data and Methodology 143 Support Vector Machine Classifiers 143 Surfer Behavior and Crawl Depth 150 Hitwise's Data and Methodology 151 References 155 Index 173
