From Mass Media to Polymedia: Echo Chambers in PolymediaSociety

Abstract

During the first two decades in the 21st century, it is clear that for the

mass media, which played a major social role in the last century, its role has

relatively been diminished, and the Internet has penetrated deeply into

Japanese society.

　What are the implications for society of this change from an era in which

mass media exerts a great influential power to shape society at large to an

era in which the Internet also plays a major role? If we contrast the mass

media and the Internet, the characteristics of the Internet are said to be

“diversification,”“polarization,” “filtering,” and “micro-targeting” which drives

its growth as an advertising medium. In the political dimension, these

characteristics have attracted strong social and academic interest, as they are

supposed to produce the phenomenon of “social polarization” and “echo

chambers.”

　　In this paper, I would argue that the technological determinism that “the

Internet intensifies social polarization” is false. I propose to consider the

relative reduction of the role of the mass media and the expansion of the

Internet media not as the “from the masses to the net” phenomenon but as

the “formation of a polymedia society.” My study, after specifying an “echo-

chamber scale” using social survey data, suggests that the higher the media

diversity, the lower the echo-chamber degree. That is, active use of the

polymedia environment is important to reduce the echo-chamber degree.

From this perspective, the concern is that Japanese society has a high echo-

chamber level compared internationally.