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.

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.

In this paper, we show that an emerging global village represents only one outcome from a range of possibilities. It is also possible that improving communications access through emerging technology will fragment society and balkanize interactions. In particular, we focus on the potential balkanization of preferences, including social, intellectual and economic affiliations, analogous to geographic regions. Just as separation in physical space, or basic balkanization, can divide geographic groups, we find that separation in virtual space, or "cyberbalkanization" can divide special interest groups.