Where do you get your news and information around the world" By now, the ideal dream of consuming a wide array of sources to understand a diverse range of opinions and cultures should have been fully realized.
So why does it feel like we are soaking up an ever-narrower range of information" Why does it feel like every news story out there, and every response to it, perfectly matches our own prejudices"
Blame the internet. More specifically, blame social media and the echo chambers that we have built inside them.
In the mid-1990s, the promise of the early internet was to connect divergent communities from across the world–to surface the kinds of events and opinions that, though we may find challenging, would yield greater global understanding. At the time, The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams wrote of his hope that this ?fourth wall? of separation would come crashing down as we shared in online communities, forcing us mere ?villagers? out to mingle in the whole wide world.
Bitterly, what is transpiring is the opposite. In Facebook, Twitter and others, by connecting with our existing friends and by following our preferred information sources, we have only replicated our old villages. We have recreated our online communities in the image of our old worlds. And by reconstituting our same network of acquaintances, rather than reaching out to the unknown, we have merely transposed our own social class, views and opinions.
Case in point:...