How Much Does Your Media Consumption Isolate You?

University of Chicago researchers put together an Isolation Index to measure how much different forms of media isolate consumers by ideology. It will hopefully surprise Cass Sunstein—not so much anyone who was actually reading reading newspapers during, say, the run-up to the Iraq war—that according to their findings, the Internet is less ideologically isolating than national newspapers.

Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix notes that the Internet, newspapers, and other forms of the conservative-corporate-liberal media were found by the researchers to be considerably less isolating than actual meatspace social networks like workplaces and, least surprisingly of all, families. I expect Sunstein’s Republic 3.0 to propose legislation regulating dinner-table conversation and bar talk.