More News, Less Diversity

This article was an interesting find as it proposed the idea that despite the internet's best efforts to promote diversity of opinion and alternative points of view, the online media world is actually more monopolized than the offline world. Hindman and Cukier's point is that "Users may be able to choose from millions of sites, but most go to only a few. This isn't an accident or the result of savvy-branding. It's because Internet traffic follows a winner-takes-all pattern that is much more ruthless than people realize. Relying on links and search engines, most people are directed to a few very successful sites; the rest remain invisible to the majority of users. The result is that there's an even greater media concentration online than in the offline world." This is definitely true when we think about the main news sites that many of us are acquainted with - Yahoo7, ninemsn, news.com.au... the list goes on. Much in the same way we ingest major publications such as The Australian and The Age, these huge sites which are centres for the daily news work no differently to your average publication from NewsCorp.