Too Much of a Good Thing?

Growing in popularity online are social bookmarking and news aggregating sites. Nearly every notable news site now has buttons on every page to "Digg This!" or "Share This on Facebook" or something similar. While a handful of these sites are purely social endeavors, businesses like Digg and Reddit purport to have some sort of journalistic benefit. No, they aren't generating original content, but they are disseminating information to the masses. More importantly, they illustrate a significant problem with online journalism: the overwhelming amount of choice facing the user. This becomes a problem when users begin to exclusively visit sites that attract an audience they identify with, which they are liable to do considering the polarized and vitriolic political environment we've enjoyed the last few years.

Soon, John Q. Internet forgoes visiting MSNBC.com because he'd rather visit Digg and only see stories that interest and agree with him. Forget objectivity and transparency, people would rather read a story biased in their favor and discuss it with like-minded people than engage in yet another fruitless Internet argument. While we've previously survived eras of American journalism during which publications were blatantly partisan, the Internet ironically enables people to be simultaneously less informed and more certain of their beliefs than ever before.