Civility, Ideology, and The Internet

Last week, an old post of Ann Althouse was resurrected. In this old post, she characterizes herself as a moderate and said that liberal bloggers were much ruder to her, than the conservative bloggers.

Well, nobody considers Althouse a moderate mostly because of the company that she keeps in the Internet. If you pal around with Glenn Reynolds and Hugh Hewitt, ain’t nobody on the left going to like you. You are your blogroll. If you like to play with people on both sides of the ideological spectrum, like I do, that just makes everyone very confused.

There is no room for subtlety in the blogosphere. If you say that you are liberal on this, but conservative on that, you’ve already lost half your readers. People are zooming through the blogs at lightening speed and then need to know what you are about immediately. If you can put it in your tag line, even better. “I’m a God-Fearin’ Christian and Want to Make Sweet Monkey Love To Ann Coulter” “I’m a Guilt-Ridden Liberal and I Spend Every Waking Moment Thinking of Ways to Steal Your Money” I’m not even sure if there are any successful, truly moderate bloggers.

And rudeness crosses across all ideologies. Mostly because rudeness sells well on the Internet. If I write a post that says, “I agree with this person because of A and B, but disagree because of C”, nobody will link to it. If I write a post that says, “Blogger A doesn’t shave her armpits”, that will get lots of notice. It’s simple, armpit is a funny word, and people like fights.

Cass Sunstein in Republic.com wrote that political thought gets more extreme in the Internet, because people band together with like minded people. His research on jury deliberation shows that when people talk only with people who agree with them, their views grow more intense.

I’m not sure that this works for the blogosphere. People are definitely reading blogs of other political stripes. But they are doing so to find good blog fodder. Extremity of thought is the result of the short attention span of most Internet readers, the need for cut and dry political identifications, and the primary function of the blogosphere, which is to entertain.