I think most of us are struggling to make sense of the bombardment of "news" we encounter daily. On top of that we have to fight the algorithms that try to spoon feed us the "information" the software believes we want to be exposed to. I used to watch TV news 3+ hours a day (mostly MSNBC and CNN), before I came to the conclusion, that basically all add driven news presentation has an agenda, and that includes newspapers, as my countryman, Kierkegaard, argued a long time ago. I've had a parallel discussion with another Stack writer, Michelle Teheux, about the role of education ( is job training education), and it gives me a headache to try to come up with a solution that may not exist. What does that leave us, other than forming associations with other seekers of the "truth" with the unintended consequence of ending in another bubble/ echochamber?
Thanks for the response! I agree that this problem is rather complicated, especially due to the large degrees of subjectivity that we attribute to information and personal opinions. However, I think the resolution mainly lies in critical thinking, analysis, and understanding of the underlying mechanics of power found in media. I wouldn’t categorize “truth seekers” as an echochamber because I see a fundamental difference between the two. While an echochamber relies on a set of premises being accepted and defended by default by all participants (such as Flat Earthers believing the Earth is flat), a group of critical thinkers do not hold such universal premises as true, and instead try to employ critical thinking for any piece of information they consume, often resulting in diverging opinions. So I’d tend to believe that we are in the clear, although media is an infinitely complex topic related to epistemology, which is ever more complex in and of itself :)
I think most of us are struggling to make sense of the bombardment of "news" we encounter daily. On top of that we have to fight the algorithms that try to spoon feed us the "information" the software believes we want to be exposed to. I used to watch TV news 3+ hours a day (mostly MSNBC and CNN), before I came to the conclusion, that basically all add driven news presentation has an agenda, and that includes newspapers, as my countryman, Kierkegaard, argued a long time ago. I've had a parallel discussion with another Stack writer, Michelle Teheux, about the role of education ( is job training education), and it gives me a headache to try to come up with a solution that may not exist. What does that leave us, other than forming associations with other seekers of the "truth" with the unintended consequence of ending in another bubble/ echochamber?
Thanks for the response! I agree that this problem is rather complicated, especially due to the large degrees of subjectivity that we attribute to information and personal opinions. However, I think the resolution mainly lies in critical thinking, analysis, and understanding of the underlying mechanics of power found in media. I wouldn’t categorize “truth seekers” as an echochamber because I see a fundamental difference between the two. While an echochamber relies on a set of premises being accepted and defended by default by all participants (such as Flat Earthers believing the Earth is flat), a group of critical thinkers do not hold such universal premises as true, and instead try to employ critical thinking for any piece of information they consume, often resulting in diverging opinions. So I’d tend to believe that we are in the clear, although media is an infinitely complex topic related to epistemology, which is ever more complex in and of itself :)