Media Literacy Challenge #9: Polarization

The Nomadic Blog

Notes and reflections on history and education

Nate Noorlander
June 1, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

Polarization in the United States seems obvious—but what explains it, and is it as bad as we think? Perhaps understanding some of the mechanisms behind (1) polarization and (2) the perception of polarization can help us engage with today’s media in an informed and productive way.

Which of the mechanisms described below feels familiar to you? Download the optional handout below for the full reading assignment students complete in the course.

If we want to really understand how social media echo chambers shape our political beliefs, we need to solve a “chicken or the egg” problem: do our social media networks shape our political beliefs, or do our political beliefs determine who we connect with in the first place?

Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism, p.15

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To the extent that social media allow us to create our very own feeds, and essentially live in them, they create serious problems. And to the extent that providers are able to create something like personalized experiences or gated communities for each of us, or our favorite topics and preferred groups, we should be wary. Self-insulation and personalization are solutions to some genuine problems, but they also spread falsehoods, and promote polarization and fragmentation. An architecture of serendipity counteracts homophily, and promotes both self-government and individual liberty.

Cass Sunstein, #republic, p.14

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Because they tap into apparently common-sense understandings of our world…, moral panics are deeply persuasive, and echo chamber and filter bubble concepts have therefore been accepted widely (often rather unquestioningly)… In particular, even while ramping up their own social media offerings, mainstream news media have gladly accepted the idea of social media as echo chambers because it enables them to claim that, compared to these new competitors for the attention of news audiences, only the carefully researched and edited news published by established news outlets offers a balanced news diet that penetrates the cocoon.

Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real? Introduction

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[T]he causal connection between policy preferences and party loyalty has become warped, with partisans adjusting their policy preferences to align with their party identity. For example, a recent experiment demonstrated that Republicans exhibit a liberal attitude shift after exposure to a clip of President Donald Trump voicing a liberal policy position; there is little evidence to suggest that Democrats are immune to analogous shifts in response to their own political leaders. Overall, the severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement…

“Political Sectarianism in America…” Science 370, no. 6516 (October 30, 2020)

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Influence, activism, and profit are increasingly intertwined. The line between authentic enthusiasm versus paid promotion blurs the line between content and propaganda. It’s not subterfuge per se—but when online presence is monetizable, truth/untruth and interest/disinterest lie along a spectrum. The influencer may genuinely believe what he’s saying but is also benefiting financially or gathering more attention…

Renee DiResta, Invisible rulers, p.105

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[P]olitical polarization is not as bad as most people think… Though Americans [in the mid-1990s] were divided about contentious issues such as abortion, the sociologist Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues discovered that the rates of disagreement about this and many other divisive issues did not increase between the 1970s and 1990s. Meanwhile, the social psychologist Robert Robinson was leading a team that was about to make a parallel discovery. Robinson’s team recruited college students who took liberal or conservative positions on abortion and racial conflict. In addition to measuring each student’s opinion on a range of questions related to each issue, the team also asked the students to estimate what people from the opposing party thought about each issue. The results would not have surprised DiMaggio and his colleagues: both liberals and conservatives drastically overestimated the difference between their views and those of the other side. They also underestimated the amount of difference in views within their own side.

Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism, p.99

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #9: Polarization

Definition

polarization:

sharp divisions between mutually hostile camps with different views; the camps constitute opposing “poles” along a given axis, e.g., the left-right political axis

false polarization:

the false perception of sharp divisions and mutual hostility between different camps with different views; when each “side” significantly overestimates the degree to which they differ from the “other side”

Downloadables:

5 Responses

Hyrum Petersen says:

June 2, 2026 at 1:45 pm

I agree that there has been a lot of polarization lately, whether false or not, and I think social media inflates that, but if you really want to see how much there is, you need to go out and talk to all sorts of different people, interact with them, see the world from their lens, and compare it to yours and others.

Reply
Wanda W. says:

June 2, 2026 at 7:28 pm

I recently looked online for heavy winter woolen socks. I was then flooded with advertisements for woolen socks, websites that I hadn’t heard of before let me know they had woolen socks. Before my search, I had never seen an advertisement for woolen socks, but I also got advertisements for battery operated socks too, I guess because they are supposed to be warm as well. Did other people I know get advertisements for socks? No. I had not previously received advertisements for any type of socks. The thing is, if you use online sources, everything you click on is tracked and you will suddenly see similar things just showing up everywhere you go online. Click some right leaning article because it has a catchy, though uninformative title, and you will get more of that. Click on some left leaning article because there is an emotional title, and you will get more of that. Click on anything and you will get whatever AI or metrics think is similar and will therefore be of interest to you. So yes, I think if you consume online sources, you will be shown lopsided choices. However, if you consult physical, living people in your life, newspaper, television, or radio, you are likely to have chosen that because you know the slant they have and want to hear more of it, or you know that it is more fact based and less opinion based, and that is what you want.

Political parties can tell you the demographics of the people they appeal to. Young black male? College educated senior citizen? Female with young children? Earning over 50K? Under 25K? Two comma earnings? Chronic health condition? Latina? Cuban? You are statistically likely to have interests and opinions similar to those who are similar to you, and are likely to be friends with people who are more, rather than less similar.

I think that being aware of this is important. Some sources are not trustworthy and outright lie, just for clicks or viewership which can reap them financial rewards.

There is an old saying, “buyer beware” perhaps that ought to be expanded to “consumer beware” with the understanding that if you are reading, watching, or listening, you are consuming that source.

By the way, there is considerable variety in the quality, thickness, and performance of wool socks. Just in case you wondered.

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Emily D. says:

June 3, 2026 at 3:46 pm

“[P]olitical polarization is not as bad as most people think…” Amen!
I’ve been watching a cute old series called Death Valley Days, which claims to be based on historical stories from the settlement of Death Valley and the surrounding West. One thing it has reinforced for me is that polarization is as old as humanity itself.
Today, of course, technology allows us to hear from the angriest 1% almost instantly, no matter where they are in the world. The loudest voices are often the most visible, which can make division seem greater than it really is.
What I keep coming back to is this: I have yet to find an issue so urgent, so pressing, or so life-altering that there wasn’t time to try to understand it for myself before reacting—or to show patience- not acquiescence, toward someone who sees it differently than I do.
Unfortunately, I keep learning this lesson the hard way. I am prone to falling in line with “my tribe” and reacting too quickly, only to regret my response later. One way to cool down polarization is to stop assuming I know what the other side is going to say before they get the chance to say it.

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Brenna says:

June 5, 2026 at 10:47 am

Interesting quotes. I think they are all relative to our current state at least a degree. I was reminded of a couple of posts back with remembering and realizing we as a nation have more in common then we think, but because the extremes are more likely to be activists, and they create the catchy headlines, it is too easy forget that. If we want to be more unified, we probably have to figure out the extreme polarization.

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Camille P says:

June 17, 2026 at 3:14 pm

Cass Sunstein’s quote rang true for me – I have been aware of the algorithms personanlizing our feeds for a long time; I hadn’t thought about the implications of our news feeds and our google searches following personalized “filter bubbles” before. I looked up the TED talk (linked in the additional reading) by Eli Pariser, and his pointing this out was an aha moment for me. He said, “This moves us very quickly toward a world where the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” I believe that we need to see more of the humanity of the “other” side and find common ground, not increase the distance in our division.

Reply

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