This extract really struck me re the growing distance between groups of the population. Written about US politics but clearly applicable here, the explosion of media/opinion/entertainment/news etc means we can construct a self-selected world in which to live and never have to hear different perspectives... article here from the New Yorker
e are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the other only “Game of Thrones.” What is the meaning, to the collective “we,” of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it. You, the other knight, strike me as bafflingly ignorant, a little unmoored. In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.
This extract really struck me re the growing distance between groups of the population. Written about US politics but clearly applicable here, the explosion of media/opinion/entertainment/news etc means we can construct a self-selected world in which to live and never have to hear different perspectives... article here from the New Yorker