Enlightening Confusion: How Contradictory Findings Help Mitigate Problematic Trends in Digital Democracies

Abstract

This thematic issue includes ten articles that address previous contradictions in research on two main trends in digital democracies: news avoidance and political polarization. Looking at these contradictions from different angles, all contributions suggest one aspect in particular that could be important for future research to investigate more specifically possible countermeasures to harmful trends: the individualized, self-reflective way in which media users nowadays engage with political content. The increasingly value-based individualization of media use may be a hopeful starting point for reversing harmful trends to some degree by addressing individual media users as a community with a common base of civic values, rather than addressing them in their limited social group identities.

Keywords

• civic norms
• corrective action
• disinformation
• media trust
• news avoidance
• political polarization
• politicized self
• populism
• selective exposure
• social identity