ABSTRACT
American democracy faces serious challenges. Partisan polarization is at historic highs, policymaking is in gridlock, and neither policymakers nor citizens can agree with out-partisans on a shared set of facts. One of the few sentiments opposing partisans share is that American democracy is in peril. The digital media environment is a common scapegoat for these problems. Politicians, the punditry, the press, and even many researchers blame these trends on structural changes to the media environment, namely those affecting media choice and opportunities for selective exposure. In this chapter, we argue that while there might be some truth to those assessments, they are incomplete. Placing blame entirely on structural changes to the media environment that are affecting patterns of exposure underappreciates other important factors contributing to these trends. Studies should consider the ways in which individual-level cognitive biases and the rapidly proliferating menu of platforms and content structures influence how information is processed once exposure occurs. In addition, we point to media system-level factors—unchanged from earlier eras of information technology—that are also behind these trends.
