Thank you. An excellent article, on a vital topic, one that I have written about myself. There would seem to be many things that we can do to counteract this. As information consumers, we can work diligently to damp our fears and outrage—you know “Be calm and carry on”; refrain from consuming just the horrific headlines, going for the substance, and investigating the sources of the claims made; and when we find debunked misinformation, both refrain from passing it on and declaim it publicly.
As communications or high tech professionals and information providers, though, we need to explore ways to turn the technology to good purposes. I expect that there are a great many ways to do that, once we have decided to address the problem, and I look forward to reading your suggestions. I will follow avidly.
I did come up with at least one notion of my own and that is creating search or filter algorithms that explicitly work against building bubbles. My notion was that if a preponderance of the results were selected based upon your tastes, biases and choices, but a small number were chosen because they were just outside your bubble, and an even small number were chosen to be way outside your bubble, that it would be a way of making the results both more interesting and somewhat broadening. There’s more to my notion than that, but you get the drift. If you’re curious it is here on medium as part 2 of my Bursting the Bubble series “Artificial Assistance”.
Thanks, again, Tobias Rose-Stockwell.