The Myth of Digital Democracy by Hindman Matthew

Author:Hindman, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Metrics for Concentration

Looking at the market share of the top outlets is not the only way to measure concentration, and social scientists have long relied on more systematic measures to judge the gap between the resource rich and the resource poor. For our purposes, I adapt two of the most broadly used metrics in order to compare concentration across online and off-line media. I also apply a recently proposed metric developed specifically to measure media diversity.

The first of these metrics is the Gini coeffient. Originally developed in the early twentieth century to measure income inequality, Corrado Gini (1921) himself declared that the Gini coefficient could be used to calculate relative inequality for almost any resource. The Gini coefficient is equal to twice the area between the Lorenz curve and the (hypothetical) line of perfect equality.9 There are many ways to calculate the Gini coefficient, but one of the most common formulas is provided by Malcolm Brown (1994). If X is the cumulative proportion of the population, and if Y is the cumulative proportion of the resource in question, the Gini coefficient is equal to the following:

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