The duality of life

Continuing with these ramblings…

I want to expand on this idea of two worlds for a moment. Us and them, me vs you, this and that. It seems to be an interesting quirk of the human condition that we create bubbles to place ourselves and portions of our lives in (social networks, social circles etc) and then arbitrarily allow permeability to occur, blocking and allowing some data streams to penetrate. Take for example the ways in which people insulate themselves when it comes to current events, the number of people who receive their news from social media has doubled since 2010. A large proportion of these people don’t then receive news from other sources, relying purely on this single data stream and creates a strong ‘bubble’ effect. Now I wouldn’t have to much of an issue with this, except that these networks we create ourselves are designed to agree with us and make us feel happy and tell us we look pretty and so forth. Disagree? Let’s break down the concept of what a social network is; lets create a large open platform that people can fill will their niche interests and social groups, they can then use this to connect with people who are similar to them and start groups with people all across the world who share their views. Sounds great right? Except when you realise thats not how life works, everyday we meet, talk and interact with people who are very different than us. This is true for the interests we begin to follow, and we find smaller and smaller niches within our interests to explore. The problem with this arises when you zoom out and realise we have created an insular world where we socialise with people who are similar to us, receive news from sources who we agree with and generally express and receive social noise from within this closed off section of the larger whole.

So whats the opposite of this?

I would like to see a world where people are free to read one source of news and believe it, unfortunately thats exactly what a lot of people do. Media bias is rampant and to take current events as an example, one story across five news sources can be skewed in very different ways. The fault isn’t of the reader, when you log onto a ‘news’ sight, we are brought up to believe what we are reading is ‘news’. Whatever side of the social/political/economic spectrum you sit on there now is a news source that is written in such a way as to identify with you, that’s great, making things more relatable encourages a wider viewership. The problem is when people forget they are being sold a perspective and aren’t aware of the multi-sided argument they are approaching. Take for example the liberal vs conservative approach to economics. The liberal approach tends towards that of an increased government support system to ensure that people who have been handed a disadvantage have a safety net to bounce them back. A conservative approach says that government shouldn’t need to exist and that as every single person can climb the social ladder then the government needn’t provide safety nets. Now, these points are not regularly sold this way, and each side rarely stops to see the merit in the others approach. I for example would love to live in a world where government needn’t exist and regulation wasn't necessary, but to get to that world we need to lift (and drop) everyone to an equal footing, thereby providing a security for the social classes.