Linkage Patterns in the German Political Web

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in our social media mapping panel at AoIR 2010 is Christian Nuernbergk, whose interest is in tracking and mapping political interaction in online social networks. This is driven by the ‘concentration of attention’ debate: people like Yochai Benkler suggest that new online platforms provide a greater space for people to engage in discussion and conversation, while someone like Matthew Hindman claims that the Web exhibits a ‘rich get richer’ phenomenon where audiences end up concentrated around a handful of sites.

So, in Germany, which Websites benefit the most from the emerging network; how centralised is the link structure? This study worked with a dataset from Linkfluence Germany, which had already mapped the German political Web for the last election and now repeated its Web crawl to determine the overall link network. Various attributes of network actors were automatically generated, and reviewed by researchers at the University of Münster.

The result was a widely connected network, with traditional media in central positions. Link distribution does not follow a full power law, though, but shows a higher concentration of attention to a handful of top sites. The top quintile of sites received two thirds of all distinct inbound links.

So, the network is moderately centralised; it is not densely interlinked, however (the average indegree of sites was 15). Partisan Websites show different linking patterns – conservative sites are closer to the periphery, but more densely interconnected, left and green sites are more connected to the wider network and less centralised around singular Websites in their community. Media sites are only rarely linking to blogs, while links to media sites from blogs were common.

Traditional media receive the most links from non-partisan blogs, and such non-partisan blogs fulfil an important role in connecting diverse Websites. The top 100 of linked-to sites include only 16 blogs, mainly towards the end of the list. So, the overall concentration of the network does not appear to structurally hinder diversity on the German political Web; no one single news provider overly dominates communication flows; mainstream media and blogs complement one another; but mainstream media still receive the largest attention. There was only moderate cross-linking between partisan sites, and this may or may not lead to less polarisation in politics.