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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 Democracy reveals 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.

Matthew Hindman is assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University.

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi
Chapter One: The Internet and the "Democratization" of Politics 1
Democratization and Political Voice 4
A Different Critique 8
Gatekeeping, Filtering, and Infrastructure 12
The Difference between Speaking and Being Heard 16
Chapter Two: The Lessons of Howard Dean 20
The Liberal Medium? 21
"Big Mo'" Meets the Internet 26
The Internet and the Infrastructure of Politics 27
The End of the Beginning 34
Chapter Three: "Googlearchy": The Link Structure of Political Web Sites 38
What Link Structure Can Tell Political Scientists 41
The Link Structure of Online Political Communities 45
Site Visibility and the Emergence of Googlearchy 54
The Politics of Winners-Take-All 56
Chapter Four: Political Traffic and the Politics of Search 58
The Big Picture 60
Traffic Demographics 67
Search Engines and (the Lack of) User Sophistication 68
What Users Search For 70
Search Engine Agreement 78
How Wide a Gate? 80
Chapter Five: Online Concentration 82
Barriers to Entry 83 Distribution, Not Production 86
Online Concentration 90
Comparative Data, Comparative Metrics 91
A Narrower Net 99
Chapter Six: Blogs: The New Elite Media 102
Blogs Hit the Big Time 103
Bloggers and the Media 105
So You Want to Be a Blogger 113
Blogger Census 118
Bloggers and Op-Ed Columnists 125
Rhetoric and Reality 127
Chapter Seven: Elite Politics and the "Missing Middle" 129
The Limits of Online Politics 131
A Narrower Net 133
Political Organizing and the Missing Middle 139
New Technology, Old Failures 141
Appendix: On Data and Methodology 143
Support Vector Machine Classifiers 143
Surfer Behavior and Crawl Depth 150
Hitwise's Data and Methodology 151
References 155
Index 173
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