Is there such a thing as the "Daily Me" effect? Is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on to something when he writes:

...We generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

I'm not here to argue with Kristof's general claim, that human nature and modern society leads to clustering around ideas and people that tend to give us comfort rather than ideas and people who challenge us to think different. But his column makes a bit of an intellectual leap, arguing from a set of non-internet-related cases (what kinds of mailings do people like to receive, the tendency of people in like-minded group settings to intensify their common views) to a big claim about the impact of the decline of newspapers and the rise of the internet, that it is going to make our society more polarized and less in touch with differing points of view.