The myth of digital democracy / Matthew Hindman.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-171) and index.

1. The Internet and the "Democratization" of Politics -- Democratization and Political Voice -- A Different Critique -- Gatekeeping, Filtering, and Infrastructure -- The Difference between Speaking and Being Heard -- 2. The Lessons of Howard Dean -- The Liberal Medium? -- "Big Mo'" Meets the Internet -- The Internet and the Infrastructure of Politics -- The End of the Beginning -- 3. "Googlearchy": The Link Structure of Political Web Sites -- What Link Structure Can Tell Political Scientists -- The Link Structure of Online Political Communities -- Site Visibility and the Emergence of Googlearchy -- The Politics of Winners-Take-All -- 4. Political Traffic and the Politics of Search -- The Big Picture -- Traffic Demographics -- Search Engines and (the Lack of) User Sophistication at What Users Search For -- Search Engine Agreement -- How Wide a Gate? -- 5. Online Concentration -- Barriers to Entry -- Distribution, Not Production -- Online Concentration -- Comparative Data, Comparative Metrics -- A Narrower Net -- 6. Blogs: The New Elite Media -- Blogs Hit the Big Time -- Bloggers and the Media -- So You Want to Be a Blogger -- Blogger Census -- Bloggers and Op-Ed Columnists -- Rhetoric and Reality -- 7. Elite Politics and the "Missing Middle" -- The Limits of Online Politics -- A Narrower Net -- Political Organizing and the Missing Middle -- New Technology, Old Failures -- App. On Data and Methodology -- Support Vector Machine Classifiers -- Surfer Behavior and Crawl Depth -- Hitwise's Data and Methodology.