## 7 Conclusions  
Given that people increasingly rely on the new media rather than the conventional media, the findings clearly suggest that the proportion of specialist-type citizens will grow in the society. Then, one important question may be whether specialist-type citizens make democratic society healthier or more vulnerable.  
However, it is not so simple to answer the question. Many political communication scholars have expressed concern that with the increased emergence of specialists, the society will become more fragmented. [PERSON] [40] indicated that publics should agree on what are important issues in the community to facilitate a meaningful discourse on public affairs. Particularly, traditional news media have long served this role by providing citizens with information journalistic institutions deem relatively important. However, if specialists seek information only in a certain domain of their interest and avoid all other issues, the society will lose common agendas that should be shared by all public members [32]. Another concern about the rise of specialists is that public opinion will grow polarized [41]. As the current findings indicated, specialists tend to engage in selective exposure through new media, which in turn reinforce their issue attitudes, resulting in a more polarized public opinion at an aggregate level.  
Others, however, especially supporters of a pluralistic model of democracy, have argued that generalists are not necessary for democracy to work and that specialists would achieve the same or even better outcomes. In favor of this perspective, numerous studies have indicated that people who perceive an issue as relevant to them also tend to be behaviorally engaged in the issue [5,12]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [12] described them as players in the arena of influence, who exert pressure on government and vote based on their issue positions. Considering that most citizens are notoriously indifferent to public affairs in general, it is commendable that citizens care about at least a few issues of interest rather than none. This rise of issue specialists may moderate the traditional deficiencies of political participation among those who are less attentive to public affairs in general but who care about specific issues [42]. In fact, some argue that protestors in Arab Spring or occupy movements become issue specialists by obtaining mobilizing information and coordinating collective actions through emerging technologies [34].  
The present study attempted to reassess the concept of specialist and generalist, especially in conjunction with the changing media environment. Perhaps one of the most significant contributions of the present study is that it demonstrated that the type of citizenry could be measured at the individual level and linked to other individual characteristics. Here, we have seen only a few key characteristics of specialists, in terms of individuals' media use, issue-specific knowledge, and attitude extremity. Other theorized features of specialists await more empirical support. For example, the question of whether specialists actually engage in diverse social and political activities at least within a domain of their interest is still unanswered.