Blogging’s audience fragmentation alarmed Chomsky and Sunstein, who prized shared national attention.

Evidence

The micro-fragmentation represented by blogging audiences caused panic to some thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Cass Sunstein. Chomsky argued that blogs lacked the power to constrain powerful actors. “There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.” Natasha Lennard, “Noam Chomsky, the Salon Interview: Governments Are Power Systems, Trying to Sustain Power,” Salon, December 29, 2013. Sunstein, at the height of blogging’s popularity, wrote a rare academic attack on the choices made possible by technologies like cable or the Internet. He argued that blogs and other technologies were dividing the country into informational factions who pay attention only to what they care to hear. “In a Democracy,” wrote Sunstein, “people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons. They see and hear a wide range of topics and ideas.” This vision of democracy, says Sunstein, “raise[s] serious doubts about certain uses of new technologies, above all the Internet, about the astonishing growth in the power to choose—to screen in and to screen out.” Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Both he and Chomsky preferred an environment where the nation regularly tuned in, together, to something like NBC or CBS or perhaps a public broadcaster. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 925

Categorization

• XREF: Echo chambers and information cocoons debate connects to later platform-era discussions of algorithmic feeds and filter bubbles. — connects to: Blogging opened public attention to nearly anyone with something to say — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 909
• SEED: Essay angle: the nostalgia for broadcast-era shared attention as a form of cultural authority — who benefits from the claim that fragmentation harms democracy.