The Myth of Digital Democracy

While [Matthew Hindman]'s analysis is based on United States politics, it has potential implications for the Net everywhere. His key finding is that "links between sites obey strong statistical regularities" with "starkly inegalitarian outcomes." (41) This leads Hindman to propose his own theory of "Googlearchy: the rule of the most linked." (55) For example, only 0.12 per cent of Web traffic goes to political websites versus 10.5 per cent to adult or pornographic websites. While women outnumber men in terms of Web traffic, substantially more men visit news and political sites. Neither are Web users adventurous. They rely on familiar commercial media websites with few citizens able to find a political candidate's website or bothering to visit a political advocacy site. Moreover, there is what Hindman describes as a "startling concentration of attention on a handful of hypersuccessful sites" including blogs with "winner take all patterns." (57) In terms of news, the traditional media dominate offline as well as online with few signs of the predicted fragmentation and narrowcasting. In regard to newspapers there is more audience concentration online than in the print format, leading Hindman to herald "the continuing strength of large, national, name brand news outlets." (101) Here Hindman is probably mistaken as most large newpapers in the United States from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times ire struggling financially.