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Weblog:   Political Patterns on the WWW
Subject:   preaching to the converted...
Date:   2004-02-02 00:58:14
From:   jwenting
I'd be far more interested in whether there is a similar division between social and political groupings in the NON political books they read.


Of course people who are firmly opposed to the current US president are more likely to pick up a book confirming those beliefs ("see, I was right all along") and vv. someone supporting the president is more likely to pick up the president's autobiography (OK, it's not out yet but you get the point).
There's no news in that, though I am somewhat surprised at the extreme polarity in the selections.
That tells to me that either the US political scene is even more polarised than it looks from the outside to be or the choice of books used for the study is too narrow.
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  • preaching to the converted...
    2004-02-02 06:30:27  orgnet [Reply | View]

    I only chose the starting set of books from the NYT bestseller list, the rest of the books, and ALL of links were from bookseller data. The data drove what emerged -- I just 'connected the dots', as they say. If the resulting set is "too narrow", it is because most of the books kept pointing back to each other!
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