In other words, people want to use the Internet as both a source of political information and as a vehicle to help them engage in political action. The Role of the Internet in Political Discourse More and more citizens are using the Internet to take greater personal control of their engagement in political discourse. Promoting Active Information Gathering The expanding role of the Internet is transforming the passive relationship citizens have had with political news sources. In traditional media, editors define the relative importance and amount of coverage accorded to political issues. The Internet, in contrast, provides a range of mechanisms that give more control to individuals, allowing them to create a self-defined universe of information.
People can customize many Internet news sources to reflect their personal priorities.
For example, users can utilize a topic selection mechanism to notify Internet sources of their specific interests and create an individualized news page where issues important to them are highlighted and topics that are less critical to them are filtered out. People can access easily multiple Internet news sources in order to receive diverse coverage of the same issue. For example, many Internet portals serve as clearinghouses for numerous online news sources, providing one point of contact for many different editorial points of view. People can use the Internet to provide immediate access to an extensive online repository of past news items. For example, many Internet news sites offer full-text versions of all their stories from the preceding several months, often in a free, searchable archive .