Cliques on the Internet

Kurt Vonnegut once quipped, “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” To be led by one’s high school peers is a universally horrifying sentiment mainly as a result of lasting impressions made through social observations during those formative years. The high school experience is characterized by cliques, often exclusive sub-groups, that form out of the population as a whole. Separately these cliques thrive but when forced to interact with each other there is often delay in communication and misunderstanding as a result of differences in perspective. Exchanging and receiving ideas exclusively from a minute portion of the population makes it easy to forget about the opinions of the rest of society. With the growing influence of the internet as a medium for communication and the internet’s proclivity for gathering small groups of people with ‘niche’ interests it appears that our society could be headed toward being comprised of the socially-disjointed groups that make life in high school so intolerable.

In his book, The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler discusses the historical role of media. Most notably, he shows that in pre-internet times, information was spread from a centralized source to the masses—the “hub and spoke” mode of distribution. Functioning this way, it was advantageous for the suppliers of media to target the “lowest-common-denominator” audience. The pressure from advertisers to maintain the greatest number of viewers fostered an era of vanilla-flavored information “because it is easier to lose an audience by offending its members than by being only mildly interesting” (20). Benkler stresses that these banalities were not “failures of imagination, thoughtfulness, or professionalism on the part of media organizations. “These [we]re simply characteristics of a mass-mediated public sphere” (23). In short, the often generic feeling of media was merely the result of the suppliers needing to show profit. And despite its compromise of quality, the media of the twentieth century communicated information to the masses effectively.

In contrast to the compromise made by many consumers favoring accessibility over quality during the mass-media age, the internet allows each user to find specifically what it is that he is seeking. This has revolutionized the way in which information is distributed. Thanks to advances that bring newspapers, television, and radio stations online, citizens are now customizing what they want to be reading, watching, and listening to rather than settling for one-size-fits-all programming. The advantages of these ‘niche’ groups include an increase in quality since productions are no longer geared toward the “lowest-common-denominator.”

Unfortunately, this customization fosters segregation. After discovering a group of like-minded people with similar interests it is difficult to return to interacting with other parts of society. There is no question that dealings are easier amongst people with similar morals, interests, and activities but it is through interaction with others whose ideas conflict with our own that we solidify our own opinions. It is also through these encounters that a society is defined. There is a strong temptation to remain within one’s comfort zone where ideas and news flow freely but in order for society to advance, all ideas must be heard. With the absence of contact between members of these different groups we run the risk of creating an environment similar to that of a perpetual high school in which communication is stilted and often non-existent.