David Brooks has written a terrific column about a terrific research paper by two of the most impressive young economists working today, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered. If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

This last part is tricky: the self-segregation dynamic that David has been writing about for years — check out his excellent column in The Atlantic on “People Like Us,” published in 2003 — really is a mostly offline phenomenon.

But the Internet enables exposure to unfamiliar ideas, folkways, and cultural sensibilities that can heighten cultural defensiveness in other ways, as Julian argued in his essay on “Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance.”

You’ve got a local community where a certain set of cultural norms is so dominant that it’s just seen as obvious and natural that a lesbian wouldn’t have an equal right to participate in prom—to the point where the overt hostility isn’t really directed at Constance’s sexuality so much as her bewildering insistence on messing with the way everyone knowsthings are supposed to be. They’re not attuned to the injustice because it seems like almost a fact of nature. Except they’re now flooded with undeniable evidence that a hell of a lot of people don’t see things that way, and even hold their community in contempt for seeing things that way. There have been thousands of “outside” posts in a handful of days, with more every minute.

Judging by the comments section at various websites with big audiences, I can attest to the fact that many people really are ”going off on forays looking for things to hate.” Perhaps we’d be better off if Internet interlocutors were a bit more insecure, or rather a bit more humble.

Though I do think that the new landscape is a mixed bag, there is far more good than bad. It’s important not to romanticize the past, when the barriers to acquiring high-quality information were very high.