Browsing Alone?

In the April-June issue of Political Communication Eric Uslaner analyses two surveys of Internet users' behavior and attitudes to challenge the arguments advanced by Putnam and others that the Internet is accelerating the erosion of American social capital begun by television. Uslaner finds that people who are more trusting of other people are if anything slightly more likely to use the Net than those who are less trusting. But starting to use the Internet makes people neither more nor less trusting. As Uslaner points out, this makes sense when we remember that trust in this context means a positive relationship between people who do not have much in common with each other. The Internet tends to make it easier to find others with whom we have something in common, and communities tend to grow up around those commonly shared characteristics to the exclusion of "strangers". This chimes in with a discussion I had at my department's open day on Saturday with a student who is studying the possibilities of online communication between different ethnic groups living in the same locality.

Uslaner, Eric M., 2004. Trust, Civic Engagement, and the Internet. Political Communication Vol. 21 No. 2 April-June 2004, pp. 223-242.

Attack Ads and Voters' Memories

John and James Geer's article in the March 2003 issue of Political Behavior makes an interesting challenge to the conventional wisdom regarding the effects of negative political advertising. Using the Information Processing Approach of experimental psychology, they recorded dummy radio campaign ads and evaluated students' recall of them. The Geers found that negative ads do not stick in voters' memories significantly more or less than positive ads. This finding supports the argument that attack ads do not turn voters off politics. However, participants' recall of negative ads was less accurate than their recall of positive ads. It's an open question whether such inaccurate recall is necessarily undesirable in a democracy. The authors call for more research to be done on media of political communication apart from TV.

Geer, John G. and James H. Geer, 2003. Political Behavior, Vol.25 No. 1, March 2003. pp. 69-95.