![]() ![]() ![]() Thus, for example, one might plausibly study differences in linking practices across blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, exploring how variations in architecture and other factors lead to different outcomes. For example, different Internet-based technologies have different architectures, encouraging or discouraging different kinds of behavior ( Lessig 1999). Instead, one should disaggregate it into more discrete phenomena, allowing scholars to ask research questions that they have some hope, however faint, of answering. First-and most significantly-it suggests that one should not study the Internet as such. Thinking about the Internet in this way has some important implications. Scholars are beginning to uncover specific ways in which the Internet may affect politics, and to explore these relationships using both qualitative and quantitative data. However, political science has paid little attention to the Internet until quite recently. Does the Internet exacerbate political polarization? Does the Internet empower ordinary citizens vis-à-vis political elites? Can the Internet help activists to topple dictators? How should political scientists study the Internet's influence on politics? Political science can surely help improve current public arguments about the Internet, which center around a few very general questions. INTRODUCTION: AGAINST STUDYING THE INTERNET However, integrating the Internet's effects with present debates over politics, and taking proper advantage of the extraordinary data that it can provide, requires good causal arguments and attention to their underlying mechanisms. Over time, ever fewer political scientists are likely to study the Internet as such, as it becomes more and more a part of everyday political life. This will allow scholars to disentangle the relevant causal relationships and contribute to important present debates over whether the Internet exacerbates polarization in the United States, and whether social media helped pave the way toward the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the Internet and political outcomes. Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. ![]()
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