The Dissolution of Dissent
... Or the Illusion of Consensus
I was listening to TWIT today and there was an interesting discussion regarding an article by Eric Alterman, Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper. There is no doubt that media consumption has changed since the advent of the Internet, but is it necessarily for the better? In the article, there was particularly interesting quote:
The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity.
This lead me to question our changing information gathering habits. In particular:
- How does our compulsive media grazing affect our sense of objectivity? The rise of RSS syndication for news and the corresponding proliferation of blogs has resulted in the fragmentation of traditional media distribution channels, but at what cost?
- At what point does discussion become simple self-confirmation when dissenting ideas can be selectively ignored?
- Where is the line between commentary and fact? When does the conversation itself becomes the news?
I think that the peril of group-think is real. This is specially true when the context which surround the facts can become occluded by self-interested selective focus. Instead of true discussions, a dialog simply consist of validation of opinions you already possess. The dialog becomes an echo chamber for a single idea.
Agreeing to disagree fosters a constant re-evaluation of truths you hold in the context of new facts becoming available. The meme pool we enshroud ourselves with should be allowed diversity, otherwise we will succumb to the atrophy of ideas.
