The Internet became the ultimate tool for finding like minds and blocking out others long before supporters of candidates began seeking one another out on Meetup.com. With online dating sites where searches can be tailored by age and income, e-mail forums for the most narrow band of subjects, bookmarked sites and even spam filters, the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium. Social scientists even have a term for it: cyberbalkanization.
—Amy Harmon, "Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again," The New York Times, January 25, 2004

A growing body of research suggests that on-line participation by so-called e-citizens may be qualitatively different from off-line forms of civic engagement and participation. The personalization features of the Internet provided by various filters and customization tools have the potential to lead to the ''cyberbalkanization'' of the on-line public sphere into increasingly insulated groups of like-minded ''interest-based communities'' who increasingly know and care more and more about less and less.
—Graham Longford, "Canadian democracy hard-wired?," Canadian Issues, June, 2002

When everyone is online, the Internet can be an effective way to recruit people for memberships in civic organizations; if technology develops to the point where registered voters can cast their ballots online, perhaps voter turnouts will skyrocket.

There are serious problems to be overcome, Putnam said, including equal access to the Internet as well as the risk of what he calls "cyber-balkanization," as people spend more and more time interacting with people whose interests are more and more precisely aligned with their own.
—Gil Smart, "Living in our own little worlds," Sunday News (Lancaster, PA), May 10, 1998