Touche! Thanks for your insightful perspective Jonathan Kay!
How the Internet makes us dumb – today’ National Post column. Here’s the pertinent excerpt:
I’m old enough to remember the early 1990s, a time when starry-eyed futurists believed the Internet would make all of us smarter. We would learn new languages, surf newspapers from around the world, cultivate international pen pals, become more enlightened people by exposing ourselves to different opinions. Twenty years later, it turns out that all this was starry-eyed nonsense: All we want from the web is to have our own ideological biases read back to us in the most hysterical and entertaining form possible – preferably with neat little YouTube links that we can pass around to our friends.
Experts call it the “confirmation bias” – our natural psychological attraction toward data or anecdotes that serve to support our pre-existing attitudes and bigotries. It’s something that always has been part of human nature. But the combination of social media with cheap online video technology has turbocharged the confirmation bias to the point where rational political dialogue is in danger of extinction.
MUST READ:
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Internet+makes+dumb/5612975/story.html
