A common criticism I’ve heard about the blogosphere and online discussions in general is that they fragment and polarize communities, rather than bring them together to try to build consensus. IE the conservatives only talk and link to each other and same with the liberals. The same kind of behavior can probably be seen in science (ie the science vs religion debate).

But what has always bugged me about this argument is: weren’t communities already polarized before the Internet came along? Haven’t we always stuck to talking and associating with people who think like us?

So I was glad to hear this question discussed at a talk last night at MIT called “Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Yochai Benkler, the co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Cass Sunstein, a law professor from the University of Chicago debated (among other things) whether the Internet has deepened the divisions in society. Benkler talked about link analysis studies (looking at who on the Web is linking to who in specific types of discussions) and said that they show fragmentation but not as much as some have feared. However, he quickly qualified that this needs more study and better tools.

Sunstein then countered with evidence that people who talk with others sharing the same political opinions later become more extreme (eg people on the left move further to the left) and less diverse in their views. A quarter of Internet users say that they read things online that support what they already believe, according to the Pew Internet and American Life project. Benkler responded by saying that we see polarization with the ‘traditional’ media too like Fox News and that there are other cultural factors influencing this splitting of communities.

The conversation got more interesting when someone in the audience asked an astute question of whether polarization could be a good thing. Sunstein said there is evidence that by clustering with others who share their opinions, people build solidarity, feel empowered and are more likely to, basically, get off their butts. But he then argued that this clustering has a side effect: people don’t know, understand and can’t even engage with the “other side”. That, he said, was dangerous and unproductive for democracy.

So if we can’t say for sure that the Internet is leading to greater fragmentation, perhaps it’s safe to say that it doesn’t seem to be doing much to bring the fragments of society closer together. If that’s indeed the case, then what should we make of the efforts of scientists who so tirelessly blog with the aim of ‘educating’ the public or at the very least, battling the forces of misinformation (eg those who blog about topics controversial in the public sphere like evolution and climate change)?

I thought about this today as I was reading two dueling commentaries in the current issue of Nature Geoscience, which touched on a lot of the same themes as yesterday’s debate at MIT: whether the Internet (blogs, specifically) can improve the quality of discourse on a complicated and controversial topic like climate change.

On the ‘yes’ side was Gavin Schmidt, blogger at RealClimate and a scientist with the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, who wrote: “With the importance of science in policy decisions being more apparent than ever, our ability to do science and enhance its relevance in public life relies on the community’s willingness to engage, inspire and inform. Blogs are one way to do that, and they can excel at providing the context that is so often missing in other media. Not every scientist needs to have one, but maybe every scientific field does.”

On the ’no’ side is Myles Allen of Oxford who wrote about an unhappy experience he had with the blogosphere. He argues that scientists should stick with the peer review system as the way to communicate results.

Perhaps the truth of the impact of science blogging is, as they say, somewhere in between. Despite Schmidt’s optimism, I’m not sure how much science bloggers are really ‘educating’ people, if they are generally reading things online that don’t challenge their views. But on the other hand, I don’t think that that should be a reason for scientists to retreat from being citizens and speaking directly with the public.

I would love to see studies of the science blogosphere and other interactive websites to see what impacts (if any) they’re having on the public discourse and perception of science. That’s why I think experiments like the MIT Climate Collaboratorium will be interesting to watch (check out the story I posted on NNB earlier this week about it).

The collaboratorium is a prototype wiki which forces users to organize their comments into more structured argument trees, rather than letting them wage free-for-all edit wars. The goal is for the site to foster more constructive debate that would contribute to consensus building.

I hope to see more study by social scientists like Benkler and Sunstein about whether all this online chatter about science will have any impact on the political agenda as it relates to science.