Americans are consuming more news than ever — and it’s driving us further and further apart.
That’s according to a new paper
from Neil Johnson, a physicist who now runs the University of Miami’s
Complexity interdisciplinary group, which is examining collective
behavior in a number of fields.
Johnson and his team have found
that when it comes to digesting news of any kind, Americans now exist in
a state of pure polarization: the size of the extremes of the left and
right are now so large that they outnumber those in the middle ground.
As a physicist, Johnson is used
to seeing populations sorting into bell curves — think of heights and
weights, he says. So one might expect that people would naturally sort
into this normal distribution when it comes to ideology.
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