It has never been easier to get your viewpoint across to other people. The cost and ease of publishing your thoughts online are low and getting lower all the time. We should be the most widely knowledgeable generation ever. We have the means to assimilate multiple points of view on any issue and reach an informed conclusion regarding any current or past issue. But there is a problem with the way we access the information and points of view on the Net. All of us have biases. We tend to favor some opinions over others.
For example, for many around the world, the US is a bogeyman whose actions are always suspect and who can do no right. For many others particularly Americans, the US is a force for good whose actions are almost always above reproach and who can do no wrong. Each group of people will tend to seek out information that support their particular point of view. In the past, this natural bias did not matter a great deal. The main sources of information for most people were newspapers, TV and to some extent movies. These are passive media in the sense that the decision of which story to carry and which to ignore was decided by someone else for nearly all people. As a result, all of us were individually exposed to alternate points of view. We may not have liked them. We may have considered the people who held such views to be idiots. We may not have read them in detail. But at least we were forced to glance at them and thereby acknowledge their existence and occasionally their relevance. The Net broke this gate-keeping role. Now individuals have the ability to seek out all points of view on their own including ones that the old gatekeepers would filter out.
However, keep in mind that we are all biased as I mentioned above. We naturally tend to seek out opinions that reinforce our current viewpoint. This is a form of validation for us. The Net makes this process easier and easier. The algorithms that power search engines are "learning" algorithms. They try to predict what an individual would like to view based on his or her past viewing habit. Since we tend to view like minded opinions and information that validates our current views more than others, over time we will only be shown such opinions and information by them. Other opposing or even different opinions and information will get filtered out. The real problem is that we will not even realize that this filtering is taking place. Search engines and social media sites are the gateways through which we enter the Net. We trust that they will retrieve the most relevant information for us out of this vast sea. That is exactly what they try to do. But the information they retrieve reflects our biases. Entire goldmines are effectively shut out of our view and we don't even know it.
A question arises over here: is this a relevant issue or is this being like the boy who cried wolf too many times? I think this is not just a relevant issue, it is a very important issue. When we restrict ourselves to one particular set of information or a particular point of view, we are actually making ourselves less informed and less knowledgeable. We will be missing information that will give us a more holistic view of our surroundings. We will easily end up missing trends and information that can help us socially and economically. Our personal development becomes stunted and instead of growing mentally, we will shrink instead holding ever narrower and more prejudiced opinions and views which over time will be less and less relevant to our surroundings.
In addition, society will suffer. People in the same country will easily end up living in separate versions of reality. Physically they will be living together; mentally they will be universes apart. Already we see this trend in the US where liberals and conservatives seem to be living in separate worlds despite living in the same country. This has had political repercussions. A major strength of American democracy was the ability of people with different points of view to sit together and come up with joint solutions to problems. Neither side may have been happy but at least progress was made. Today, such political compromises have become extremely difficult resulting in deadlocks and paralysis. This has strong repercussions economically. Socially, people are increasingly inhabiting separate bubbles. They will know what is happening inside their particular bubble but will be unaware of what is happening elsewhere. This results in a weakening of the bonds that holds society together.
The Internet holds the promise of connecting everyone on the planet in a fashion that was simply not possible before. Not only that, it is a vast and expanding repository of information and knowledge. What used to be locked away in books and other offline media is now being put on the Net. New ways of finding and making sense of this information are being developed. Most new technologies are incremental. They allow us to do what we used to do in a better or faster (often both) fashion. The Net on the other hand is transformational. It will change the way we interact with each other and make possible new cultural, scientific and economic forms. It will be very unfortunate if we were unable to take full advantage of this because of our biases. As individuals and as a society, we will be all the poorer.
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