Has the Internet Moved Our Politics Rightward?

In considering what the Internet has meant for the politics of our times (as against the claptrap of once-fashionable cyber-utopian propaganda) I suggest as a starting point for our thinking the hard fact of the way that the Internet has made what we broadly lump together as "the media" more pervasive in our lives than ever before. This is partly because of the extent to which we are online so much even without particularly wanting to be simply because so many of our daily activities go on there (our work tasks, shopping for necessities, etc.), with this reinforced by the revolution in portability that the cell phone ushered in. However, it has also been because the individualistic and private way we use our devices (as against the way that, for example, people so often watch TV with others) has meant the combination of an extreme range of choice with an unprecedented measure of personalization designed to induce longer engagement with its content--as the users of the devices are, at the same time, not engaging with people and things offline. Those who can be online are thus likely to be so, barring a deliberate effort not to be online, which, again, daily living now makes so difficult.

The result is an unprecedented potential for propagandizing an audience, which raises another matter here, namely what sort of content people are being subjected to amid all this. As it happens the particular dynamics of the Internet, whether one thinks of its (again, in contrast with the cyber-utopian claptrap) superiority at banging away at simple messages rather than complex ones and greater susceptibility for use as a "broadcast" medium rather than the provision of nuanced explanation or nurturing of dialogue; or the ways in which it advantages those able to pay for an edge in the "attention economy," amenable to the corporate interests which gatekeep the Internet, platformable by "legacy" media with all their old biases, and with audience input disproportionately supplied by the privileged who are more often and more actively online than other groups; have greatly favored the concerns of the established and the affluent over others, and in the process the right over the left, with the significance of this amplified by the political background to the Internet age. The "hot-button" mentality of the "culture wars"; the increasing abandonment of opposition of any sort by an always highly conservative political "center" that has for generations been the sole alternative to an increasingly far right's positions; and more recently the "tech" industry in direct control of the Internet, and much of the associated media (even old-fashioned national newspapers), being increasingly open about its (not at all new and actually quite natural) alignment with the right ideologically as the "market populist" propaganda of another era falls by the wayside; have all meant that the context was that much more right-wing to begin with, especially where it could affect what there was to see online.

The result is that it seems fair to expect the Internet to move politics in a rightward direction--and to see in the course of political life over recent decades evidence for the correctness of that expectation.