Narrowing Our View Living with a catered feed of information BY: Troy Murphy |April 2018
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We live in a different world. Mass media has shifted from traditional mediums of newspapers and television to catered servings from Google, Facebook and Twitter. New Mass data processing shuffles through oodles of information, customizing a specialized collection that is guaranteed to pique our interest, saving us time, effort, and narrowing our existence. Truth ignores personal preferences, existing on a much larger buffet table. We must fight the machines that zero in on our liberal or conservative tendencies and explore on our own the depths of human existence.
“For to seek the truth, we always run the risk of discovering what one would hate to see.” Rollo May
When we open learning, we will bump against our previous embraced faulty premises. We never know it all. We have deeply imprinted biases, many of which are misguided or straight up wrong. We can allow social media to sustain and strengthen those biases with their customized news feeds or we can expand our reading lists, fighting immediate impulses of disgust, and incorporate wider more understanding views.
The most dangerous bigot is the one that believes he (or she) is above bigotry. For they not only hate, but blind themselves with tainted evidence. These are the ones who hate and believe they have a right to hate, ignorant to the proclivities of their mind; they follow vile and repulsive programing, justifying the evil cloaked with righteousness.
I’m not an alarmist, always chasing conspiracy theories. Most fears of widespread corruptions are mostly escapisms for the feeble minded, seeking explanations to their under productive lives. But the mass data era, with all its wonderful enhancements to our lives, is disturbing, not because of a corrupt government to take over our lives, but because of a nasty limiting side effect that polarizes people, creating a wide uncrossable chasm. We must fight this, listening to opinions outside of our comfort zones, exploring alternate views, and embracing friends who think a little different.
The problems of the world will not all be solved in our life time. Hate will still exist across the globe; but maybe, just maybe, we can add a little more love, a little more understanding, and a little more hope within our own spheres of influence.
