There is no diversity-participation tradeoff.

Prof. Sunstein and Glenn Reynolds (a/k/a Instapundit) are discussing the way the Internet is changing social and political discourse in our society at the uchiblawgo this week.

Sunstein worries that the Internet is enabling "polarization entrepreneurs" to exacerbate ideological differences by reinforcing ideological precommitments through repetitive, one-sided analyses of news and gossip.  The good news is that people tend to be more active once they've identified their ideological precommitments.  The bad news is they tend to be less patient with those who do not share them.

Reynolds isn't too worried first, because he figures the obnoxious rhetoric isn't representative of the largest part of people who get their news on the Internet, and second, because the obnoxious rhetoric may be a purely online phenomenon.

I'm mostly with Reynolds here, and mostly because of my personal experience with blogs and blogging.  I started reading blogs about the time I started law school in the fall of 2003.  For about three years I was checking about a half-dozen to a dozen blogs a day for new posts.  I probably spent more time on the group blogs like Slashdot or Volokh Conspiracy because they were updated more frequently.

Sometime in the middle of this period -- maybe about a year after I started reading blogs earnestly -- I tried commenting on a blog.  Commenting for the first time is kind of scary, right?  I had seen many people get into nasty arguments in the comments section, and many bloggers "outed," and I hesitated strongly, like any risk averse lawyer would.  But I got used to it because it was fun to chat with people who were interested in a particular topic.  And I don't have a lot of personal friends who share my same nerdy interests in patent law, for example.

Then about eighteen months ago, I got a feed reader, and since then have been reading more then two dozen blogs.  It's gotten to the point where I have to be really selective about what goes on the list.  I'm trying to be more and more careful about what I include and exclude.

And two months ago I took the leap and started blogging.  And if you're interested in having an audience, starting a blog naturally forces you to think carefully about narrowing your posts down to a particular set of topics.  The people who are interested in patent law don't want to wade through your posts on social networks, and vice versa.

So with my personal experience as a guide (and I think most blog readers/bloggers have a pretty similar trajectory), I have to (mostly) agree with Sunstein that there has been a trend toward (1) more specialization (i.e., less diversification) and (2) more participation.

Why then am I mostly with Reynolds?  Because unlike Sunstein, I don't see any link between my increasing specialization and my increasing participation -- i.e., I don't think that I'm participating more because I've identified (and more finely distinguished) my ideological precommitments; I'm participating more because I've gotten more comfortable being subject to the scrutiny of the incredibly large number of people on the Internet.  Just like in the non-virtual world, the people who feel the most strongly are the ones who participate the most.  But that participation is only a partial reflection of the larger group of people who are taking things in, learning, and deciding how and when to participate, if at all, in the future.