Thursday, July 17, 2008

narrowing the vision

In the blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, Scott McLeod made and interesting post about The Personalization and Polarization of America. He makes the point that we are segregating ourselves more than before, and tend to listen to like-minded people. This is done in our neighborhood choices, work environment and new gathering choices.

A few days ago, I was watching a network news show, and they had a story regarding the downfall of newspapers, part of the reason is that younger readers get their information from the Internet. Getting news from the various sources is good, but generally a person will sign up for a news feed that shares their views and interests. The newspaper allows for diverse news and opinions to come into your busy closed world. In the time it takes to boot up my computer I can get a quick overview of what is going on. I have the ability to read opinions other than my own. This is one of the great things about a newspaper. You get depth unlike network news, not as much depth as in the past, but it is there. Yes there is a bias to any writer, so articles can have a right or left slant to them, just as my local paper’s sports page has a pro-Yankees stance.

We need to have an educated populace in this nation, part of education is opening your mind to opinions other than your own, listening to one or two voices is not the way to continue your education about the world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree with idea that we must expose ourselves to diverse points of view! Otherwise we are doomed to be Bumper Sticker Thinkers!!