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#republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media QUOTES

#republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media QUOTES

1 " Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by social media, provide a form of social glue. A national holiday is a shared experience. So is a major sports event (the Olympics or the World Cup), or a movie that transcends individual and group differences (Star Wars is a candidate). So "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

2 " Or consider the fact that after people buy a new car, they often love to read advertisements that speak enthusiastically about the same car that they have just obtained. Those advertisements tend to be comforting because they confirm the wisdom of the decision to purchase that particular car. If you are a member of a particular political party or have strong convictions, you might want support, reinforcement, and ammunition, not criticism. "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

3 " Do musical preferences predict political inclinations? Not long ago, an official with Pandora said that its predictions about those inclinations, based on zip code as well as musical choices, are between 75 and 80 percent accurate. And with that level of accuracy, it developed an advertising service “that would enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leanings. "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

4 " By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government’s ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people’s lives. I "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

5 " There is another problem. Echo chambers can lead people to believe in falsehoods, and it may be difficult or impossible to correct them. Falsehoods take a toll. One illustration is the belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. As falsehoods go, this one is not the most damaging, but it both reflected and contributed to a politics of suspicion, distrust, and sometimes hatred. A "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

6 " You can become radicalized in the sense that you come to believe, firmly, a position that is within the political mainstream—for example, that your preferred political candidate is not just the best but immeasurably better than the alternatives, and that any other choice would be catastrophic. "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

7 " Partyism certainly isn’t as horrible as racism; no one is enslaved or turned into a lower caste. But according to some measures, partyism now exceeds racism. In "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

8 " In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their child married outside their political party.5 By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 and 33 percent, respectively—far higher than the percentage of people who would be “displeased” if their child married someone with a different skin color. "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

9 " Centuries later, John Rawls wrote of the same possibility: “The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments. "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

10 " Any heterogeneous society faces a risk of fragmentation. This "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

11 " Brandeis can be taken to have offered a conception of the social role of the idealized citizen. For such a citizen, active engagement in politics, at least some of the time, is a responsibility, not just an entitlement. If citizens are “inert,” freedom itself is at risk. If "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

12 " Members of a democratic public will not do well if they are unable to appreciate the views of their fellow citizens, if they believe “fake news,” or if they see one another as enemies or adversaries in some kind of war. "

― Cass R. Sunstein , #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media