afloweroutofstone:

Last decade introduced a pretty massive problem that our society has never had to grapple with at current scale before, and I don’t think anyone at all really has a solution to it: what happens when a large portion of a population voluntarily abandons news sources which make a good-faith effort at factuality in favor of news media designed to stroke their brains the right way?

This has always been a problem to some degree (tabloids are a good pre-internet example). But:

1. The number of outlets reporting (and claiming to report) the news has exploded in recent decades, meaning that people are no longer seeing the same reports, creating a major diversification in information access that has educational benefits but also weakens a shared understanding of reality.
2. I know everyone has a biased tendency to view their ideological opponents especially negatively, but the growth of Fox News really did play a big role here. Fox News was the first ever 24-hour news source in the US intentionally dedicated to serving the interests of a political party and its associated ideological movements, and over time it has both grown in influence and continuously moved to the right without stop.
3. The internet took all of this and made a million times worse. Anyone at all can claim to be reporting news and get it massive attention in hours, people have unprecedented power to self-select what they see and who they see it from, and there’s so many sources that very few people are ever receiving the same collection of information.

The CHAZ in Seattle has been a good example of this. All the reports I’ve seen from sources I consider reliable, both in and out of the left, describe CHAZ as a somewhat disorganized but nonetheless peaceful collection of various protesters who have occupied a city park. But every time I’ve sought to see how it’s reported on the right, I’ve seen manipulated and unrelated photos being shared of it that look like a war zone, discussions of widespread extortion and vigilante violence under the authoritarian reign of anarchists and gangsters, and so on. There are tens of millions of Americans who believe that, right now, Seattle is under siege by organized terrorists bankrolled by George Soros that are conquering territory in hopes of destroying America. Thousands of right-wing media organizations are reporting on what can only be described as an alternative universe like it were our own.

I’m not one of those guys who frets over divisiveness, but this in particular is a really existential problem for any society that even makes the claim to democracy. What are the long-term effects of everyone living in an individualized epistemological bubble? How do you get out of this with anything that could be considered a single polity?

(via morlock-holmes)