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Homophily and Online Politics

Homophily and Online Politics

Kevin Wallsten, Dilyana Toteva
Copyright: © 2015 |Pages: 14
ISBN13: 9781466682399|ISBN10: 1466682396|EISBN13: 9781466682405
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8239-9.ch078
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MLA

Wallsten, Kevin, and Dilyana Toteva. "Homophily and Online Politics." Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior, edited by Zheng Yan, IGI Global, 2015, pp. 958-971. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8239-9.ch078

APA

Wallsten, K. & Toteva, D. (2015). Homophily and Online Politics. In Z. Yan (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior (pp. 958-971). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8239-9.ch078

Chicago

Wallsten, Kevin, and Dilyana Toteva. "Homophily and Online Politics." In Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior, edited by Zheng Yan, 958-971. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8239-9.ch078

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Abstract

The expansion of the Internet and the sudden popularity of Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, raise important questions about the extent and consequences of homophilous sorting in online political discussions. In particular, there is growing concern that Internet users' ability to filter out alternative points of view will lead political discourse to become more polarized and fragmented along ideological lines. The decline of deliberative democracy and the breakdown of America's system of representative government, the story goes, will be the inevitable causalities of political discussions moving from in-person to online. Unfortunately, the empirical research in fields such as mass communication, political science, and sociology provides no hard and fast conclusions about the amount of online homophily in political discussions. This article details this conflicted body of research and points to some areas where future research may provide more insight into the intersection of online politics and homophilous sorting.

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