Re:Overdosing on Celebrity Gossip, The News, and Low Quality...
by mattgreenrocks on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @10:17AM
(#6553311)
And this is the true sadness: new media suffers from the exact same biases/critical flaws of old media. Except it's OK this time, because it's a different set of biases.
Also, I agree that modern manners insist on a a very peurile fear of conflict, which leads to strong segregation of viewpoints, groupthink, a lack of empathy, and even an ignorance of alternate viewpoints.
What we need, among other things, is a new set of manners that encourage conflicting opinions (or even debate) while providing ground rules for avoiding harm to feelings, reputations, and relationships. The fact is, if people become hurt, angry, or withdrawn when someone simply disagrees (let alone argues) with their viewpoint, there is not really any hope for breaking everyone out of their echo chambers. It's simply not worth it to antagonize people for the sake of calling Scientology bogus or homeopathy a waste of money.
And as long as that is the case, I don't see news aggregators (including all forms of journalism) promoting against-the-grain or otherwise uncomfortable information within their respective echo chambers.