Digital Democracy - a Hit and Myth affair

Article on the next in the 4iP/POLIS “Recasting the Net” series, which will take place in Birmingham on September 17th mentions Matthew Hindman’s new book, The Myth of Digital Democracy. It presents quite a different view of the Web world than the usual happy-hippy-everyone's equal view....:

These are the limits of Online (American) Politics that Hindman carefully categorises:

1. Political traffic is a tiny portion of Web Usage: Porn gets 100 times the traffic of political websites
2. The link structure of the Web limits the content that citizens see: because we are taken to the most popular sites we get near-monopolies
3. Search Engine Use Is Shallow: We get taken to the familiar not the best or most relevant
4. Digital Content IS Expensive To Produce: going online is cheap but being successful through marketing, capacity and software development is expensive so early entrants dominate
5. Social Hierarchies Quickly Emerge - A List bloggers are difficult to shift, so again we get near-monopolies

Nothing there you would, in your heart of hearts, disagree with based on observing the Web with a clear eye, and yet it is near heretical in certain circles. The reviewer, Charlie Beckett, makes an interesting observation about narrowness of focus on the blogosphere as the only type on New Media in politics:

....the US obsession with the political blogosphere distracted people from the much richer opportunities online. US pol blogs thrives because the American mainstream political media is so boring and so editorially narrow, be it Fox News or the New York Times. Here in the UK we have much more vibrant newspaper-based political journalism as well as the vast edifice of the BBC and other public service broadcasters.

The author's argument is that social media, the symbiotic MSM/New Meedja feeding cycle and sheer rise in connected peoples is driving a more democratic discourse than the gloomy picture above. I think that he is a bit optimistic - the organising pattern is that set up above, and the new stew will cleave to it over time.