There has been much talk in the U.S. these last few weeks about the polarity of the current political climate. Commentators wonder how it could possibly be that anyone is undecided between our two presidential candidates at this late stage in the game. Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire, taking that shows hosts to task for encouraging belligerent political theater that pushes Americans further apart. It's a must see clip. (Video here, transcript here, but really the video is much more entertaining) Slate reviewed current political demographics, showing that the country as a whole is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but most counties go overwhelmingly in one direction or the other. And now this - some hard data that very little dialogue is making it across the political divide. Valdis Krebs describes his analysis of Amazon.com's purchase patterns of political books, and finds scant overlap between the books that conservatives read and that liberals read. The graph below makes it obvious. Blue books are typically read by liberals, red books are typically read by conservatives, and the grey links between them show networks of books which are typically purchased by the same customer. The absence of lines across the middle shows that very few people are buying books from either side.
More on the technique here: The Social Life of Books: Visualizing Communities of Interest via Purchase Patterns on the WWW
Posted on
Oct 17, 11:29 PM