Matthew Hindman’s research while affiliated with Arizona State University and other places

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Publications (8)


The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain and Netroots: Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics, by Matthew R. Kerbel
  • Article

January 2010

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6 Reads

Matthew Hindman

The Myth of Digital Democracy

January 2009

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679 Reads

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872 Citations

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 Democracyreveals 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.


What is the Online Public Sphere Good For?

January 2008

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439 Reads

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38 Citations

Almost from the moment the Internet became a mass medium, observers predicted that it would change the relationship between citizens and the political information they consume. According to numerous accounts, the Internet would function as a digital printing press, enabling any motivated citizen to publish his or her views for a potential audience of millions. The architecture of the Web would also instantly link citizens with diverse opinions to one another. This citizen-created hyperlinked content would not need to follow the biases, whims, and market demands that constrain traditional media. Without barriers to entry, the public sphere would become vastly broader and more representative. Recent events have borne out at least some of this breathless, mid- 1990s Internet boosterism. Internet sources are now a large and still rapidly growing portion of American's diet of political media. According to one recent study, 14 percent of the public relied primarily on Internet sources in the lead up to the 2006 midterm elections, which is double the percentage of four years earlier.1 Citizens have also rushed to their digital printing presses with an eagerness matching the most optimistic predictions. Surveys have suggested that twelve million Americans maintain a blog, with about 10 percent of these blogs focused primarily on politics.2 The most popular political blogs and political Web sites now claim far more readers than traditional opinion journals, such as the Nation, National Review, or the New Republic. In several prominent incidents, stories first reported in political blogs became the focus of sustained mainstream press coverage. Against this backdrop, some scholars have revised, qualified, and extended early theories about how the Internet would transform the public sphere. Cass Sunstein's recent book Infotopia focuses on new collaborative models that allow citizens themselves to create and filter high-quality political information.3 Richard Rogers similarly suggests that, despite its limitations, the Web is "the finest candidate there is for unsettling infor- mational politics,"4 offering citizens exposure to political points of view not heard in traditional media. Many scholars have focused on blogging as reason for optimism. Despite a critical assessment of online deliberative forums, Andrew Chadwick concludes, "The explosion of blogging has democratized access to the tools and techniques required to make a political difference through content creation."5 While Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell note that some blogs garner far more readership than others, they state, "Ultimately, the greatest advantage of the blogosphere is its accessibility."6 Yet perhaps the most prominent recent account in this vein is Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks.7 Compared to traditional media, Benkler suggests, the Internet allows for a broader, more inclusive and more densely linked public sphere. Like the other scholars already cited, Benkler argues that the Internet does not just place far more information in the hands of interested citizens; it transforms public debates by enabling online communities to use collaborative methods to create content, correct inaccuracies, and send readers to the most insightful commentators. In this essay, I focus on Benkler's influential book to make two central claims. First, I suggest that his vision of the "networked public sphere" is partly correct and that the Internet is strengthening some democratic values. Benkler's account in particular illuminates important aspects of the Internet's impact on collective action, including the way it has made it easier to aggregate small contributions into a useful whole. There is also evidence that the Internet is strengthening public oversight by making "fire alarm" or "burglar alarm" models of citizenship more effective.8 Finally, there is reason to believe that the Internet has made journalists and other political elites more accountable or at least more vulnerable. Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott and former New York Times reporter Judith Miller have both publicly laid the blame for their travails on bloggers' criticism.9 The Mark Foley scandal that dogged Republicans during the 2006 midterm election seems to have been touched off by an obscure political blog that posted "overly friendly" e-mails between Foley and a former congressional page.10 In these incidents, the evidence for the Internet's role is strong, and the political consequences have been dramatic. Second, however, I argue that while the Internet is strengthening some democratic values, it has placed others at risk. Many continue to celebrate the Internet for its inclusiveness; others decry the medium for the same reason, worrying (as CNN president Jonathan Klein put it) that the Internet gives too much power to "a guy sitting on his couch in his pajamas."11 I argue here that the underlying premise of both assessments is wrong. Inclusiveness is precisely what the online public sphere lacks. Part of the problem is the extraordinary concentration of links and patterns in online traffic. For example, several observers have suggested that a group of A-list political bloggers attract disproportionate attention. I argue here that even the emergence of a blogging A-list barely scratches the surface of online inequality. I am going to develop this argument by targeting what I term the "trickle-up theory" of online discourse, particularly as it is formulated in Benkler's account of what he terms the "networked public sphere." As I have already suggested, Benkler's work merits special attention for several reasons. The Wealth of Networks is important in its own right, the culmination of nearly a decade of scholarship; yet Benkler's claims are also representative of those made by others. One of the virtues of Benkler's book is that it fully explicates key claims and assumptions that other scholars often gloss over. Benkler is also scrupulous about cataloging and responding to potential counterarguments. Like many other observers, Benkler argues that the networked structure of the Web itself can compensate for inequalities in traffic and in the elite profile of those who publish the most read online political outlets. He describes blogs as an "ecosystem," in which even the smallest outlets have an important role to play. Insights or discoveries made by lowerranking blogs can (in theory) travel up the hierarchy of online outlets, with the most worthy posts receiving a torrent of attention if they are linked to by the most prominent blogs. His account persistently reframes inequalities in egalitarian terms, recasting them as "collaborative filtering" or "meritocracy" in action. In what follows, I suggest that there are several reasons to be suspicious of the trickle-up theory of public debate advanced by Benkler and others. Thus far at least, public discourse online looks more like a multilevel marketing scheme than a Habermasian ideal.



Campaign Politics and the Digital Divide: Constituency Characteristics, Strategic Considerations, and Candidate Internet Use in State Legislative Elections

March 2007

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484 Reads

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118 Citations

Political Research Quarterly

The Internet has created a digital and a political divide. Just as the elderly, those less well educated, and some minorities are less likely to use the Internet than other Americans, candidates for lower-level offices are less likely to use it than presidential and congressional candidates. Beyond this, little is known about candidates' Internet use. Using data describing state legislative candidates' characteristics, campaigns, and districts, the authors find that candidates who have younger and better-educated constituents do more campaigning online. The number of years a candidate has spent in electoral politics also is relevant. The strategic and structural circumstances of the race have a major impact on candidates' Internet use.


This table illustrates the size of the Web graph crawled in the course of our analysis, as well as the number of sites that the SVM classifiers categorized as positive. The first column gives the number of Web pages downloaded. Columns two and three give the number of pages which are classified by the SVM as having content closely related to the seed pages, as well as the pages about which the SVM was hesitant. 
Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web
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  • Full-text available

August 2003

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2,195 Reads

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166 Citations

Claims about the Web and politics have commonly confounded two different things: retrievability and visibility, the large universe of pages that could theoretically be ac-cessed versus those that citizens are most likely to encounter. While the governing assumption of much previous work has been that retrievability would translate in-exorably into visibility, we cast doubt on that claim. Drawing on a large literature in computer science that ties a site's visibility to the number of inbound hyperlinks it receives, this paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the link structure surrounding political Web sites. Our technique involves iterative, extremely large-scale crawls away from political sites easily accessible through popular online search tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site content. In every community we examine, we find that a small handful of Web sites dominate. Online political communities on the Web thus seem to function as "winners take all" networks, a fact that would seem to have widespread implications for politics in the digital age.

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Googlearchy":

July 2003

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21 Reads

Many political scientists have assumed that the World Wide Web would lower the cost of political information and reduce inequalities of attention for those outside the political mainstream. However, computer scientists have consistently reported that the aggregate structure of the Web is antiegalitarian; it seems to follow a "winners take all" power-law distribution, where a few successful sites receive the bulk of online tra#c. In an attempt to reconcile these apparently disparate conclusions, this study undertakes a large-scale survey of the political content available online. The study involves iterative crawling away from political sites easily accessible through popular online search tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site content. We find that, in every category we examine, a tiny handful of Websites dominate. While this may lower the cost of finding at least some high-quality information on a given political topic, it greatly limits the impact of the vast majority of political Websites.


Measuring Media Diversity Online and Oine: Evidence from Political Websites

14 Reads

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6 Citations

Abstract As policymakers and scholars debate the impact of the Web on democratic discourse, one crucial question has remained unanswered: out of the millions of politically-relevant sites online, how many do citizens actually use? To gather evidence on this question, we examine the link structure surrounding political Web- sites. We show that the number of hyperlinks a site receives is highly correlated with site trac and is a key determinant of search engine ranking. In the,rst large-scale survey of online politi- cal content, we download and classify millions of Web pages. Links within political communities follow highly-concentrated power law distributions focused on a few hyper-successful sites. The level of concentration we,nd in links and site trac|both,overall and within political communities|is comparable to or even greater than that found in traditional media. This fact challenges much of the conventional wisdom about the Internet’s inuence,on political life. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Lada Adamic, Larry Bartels, Adam Berinsky, Kenneth Cukier, Paul DiMaggio, Eszter Hargittai, Jennifer Hochschild, Chris Karpowitz, Gabriel Lenz, Arthur Lupia, Christopher J. Mackie, Eli Noam, Clay Shirky, and Adam Simon. Any errors are our own. Research Sta Member, NEC Laboratories America (4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540; jaj@nec-labs.com) 1

Citations (6)


... This novel type or part of the public sphere has been called for instance the "digital public sphere" (see e.g. Sch€ afer, 2015; Parnes, 2016;Mazzoleni, 2015), the "online public sphere" (Hindman, 2008) or the "virtual sphere" (Papacharissi, 2008). Given that the non-hierarchical and network-based structure of the internet enables it to host a variety of types of discourses, it is not surprising that the internet has been seen to resemble the Habermasian public sphere (Gimmler, 2001;Heng & de Moor, 2003;Dahlberg, 2007b). ...

Reference:

The Challenge of the Digital Public Sphere: Finnish Experiences of the Role of Social Media in Participatory Planning
What is the Online Public Sphere Good For?
  • Citing Article
  • January 2008

... On the contrary, although news media seek to reach the largest audiences possible by definition (Vargo et al., 2014;Bachmann et al., 2021), such media did not play a significant role in the topics that dominated the tweets of the 'NO" supporters during the 2015 Greek referendum. In the past, it has been argued that online information is dominated by mainstream media outlets and political elites (Hindman, 2009). However, it seems that the interactive layout of social media can break this dominance (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013;Ceron, 2015) by favoring peer-to-peer information sharing and overstepping the established hierarchy, typical of mainstream media (Hermida, 2013). ...

The Myth of Digital Democracy
  • Citing Article
  • January 2009

... Our study utilizes a large-scale survey of candidates for American state legislatures. Some existing work on other topics has surveyed state legislative candidates in general elections across some or all states (Abbe and Herrnson 2003;Broockman and Skovron 2018;Herrnson 2003, 2004;Herrnson et al. 2007;Hogan 2002;Miller 2013), but existing surveys of state legislative candidates in primary elections have generally sampled candidates in single states (Niven, 2006). In 2022, we fielded what is to our knowledge the only survey ever conducted of nearly every Democratic and Republican candidate who ran for state legislative office (including primary candidates and those who ran unopposed) in the United States during a single election cycle. ...

Campaign Politics and the Digital Divide: Constituency Characteristics, Strategic Considerations, and Candidate Internet Use in State Legislative Elections
  • Citing Article
  • March 2007

Political Research Quarterly

... To foster a positive organizational image and brand reputation, organizations must consistently and strategically manage their presence across various media platforms. Hyperlinks are one element that must be managed, as they are considered as the central feature of the Internet and websites [16]. A hyperlink is "a technological capability that enables one specific website to link directly to another" [17] (p. ...

Measuring Media Diversity Online and Oine: Evidence from Political Websites
  • Citing Article

... En la campaña presidencial de 2008 en los Estados Unidos, la sociedad primitiva del futuro en expresión de Baudrillard, los blogs ya se habían normalizado, profesionalizado e institucionalizado (Hindman 2013); de hecho, no hay sitio en la red de alguno de los medios de comunicación tradicionales que no disponga de su elenco de blogs con autores más o menos leídos. Se ha producido la ya mentada hibridación en todos los sistemas de medios y política occidentales con mayor o menor intensidad. ...

The Closing of the Frontier: Political Blogs, the 2008 Election, and the Online Public Sphere
  • Citing Article
  • January 2008

... Brin and Page (1998), the founders of Google, described the PageRank algorithm as a mathematical way of ranking search results since it uses the number and quality of links a website gets as an indicator of the value of that website. In contrast, Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) argued that Google would systematically privilege big, well-connected, often commercial websites at the expense of smaller ones and would therefore undermine the early democratic ideals of the web (Introna and Nissenbaum 2000, see also Hindman et al. 2003, Rieder 2012. Empirical studies followed that reaffirmed these findings (Nettleton et al. 2005, Seale 2005, Mager 2009, Mager 2012a, Eklöf and Mager 2013. ...

Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web