2016-07-28 08:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplinePeriodically, some wag will pen yet another epistle against how people curate their own echo chambers on social media - citing the unfriending or unfollowing of people with different views on the bookface, most commonly, or, for the less social-media savvy, decrying the splintering of cable news into slanted offerings.
The latter criticism, I agree with - news should be presented with as little inflection and as much context as possible, so that viewers and consumers can draw their own conclusions and perform their own analysis, not be spoon-fed some pre-digested opinion like so many baby birds gulping down gizzard emissions. (I say this, not as some kind of pure and unbiased scion of journalistic objectivity, by the way - I enjoy the occasional episode of The Daily Show, used to tune into Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” for a nightly dose of righteous indignation and schadenfreude, would happily body-check anyone who gives Rachel Maddow a hard time, and who finds the Fox News Channel odious); I am subjected to eight or so hours of mercifully-muted CNN coverage on a monitor at my workplace, and it’s a case study in how not to provide depth and insight. My preferred information source is the ecru wallpaper of American broadcast journalism, NPR.
As to the former, I think that it misses the point - people are not, generally, on social media for the primary purpose of being news consumers, necessarily - many of us use it as an escape, a sanctuary, a half-step away from the nine million stressors and flavors of shit the world throws at us constantly; having boundaries and self-selected safe spaces is a self-defense mechanism, and nobody should be made to feel bad for having them.
People can, and should, have a place where comfortable agreeableness is the rule, rather than the exception.
The latter criticism, I agree with - news should be presented with as little inflection and as much context as possible, so that viewers and consumers can draw their own conclusions and perform their own analysis, not be spoon-fed some pre-digested opinion like so many baby birds gulping down gizzard emissions. (I say this, not as some kind of pure and unbiased scion of journalistic objectivity, by the way - I enjoy the occasional episode of The Daily Show, used to tune into Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” for a nightly dose of righteous indignation and schadenfreude, would happily body-check anyone who gives Rachel Maddow a hard time, and who finds the Fox News Channel odious); I am subjected to eight or so hours of mercifully-muted CNN coverage on a monitor at my workplace, and it’s a case study in how not to provide depth and insight. My preferred information source is the ecru wallpaper of American broadcast journalism, NPR.
As to the former, I think that it misses the point - people are not, generally, on social media for the primary purpose of being news consumers, necessarily - many of us use it as an escape, a sanctuary, a half-step away from the nine million stressors and flavors of shit the world throws at us constantly; having boundaries and self-selected safe spaces is a self-defense mechanism, and nobody should be made to feel bad for having them.
People can, and should, have a place where comfortable agreeableness is the rule, rather than the exception.
