The Echo Chamber– It is not my place to tell anyone how to think or vote and it is only my place to tell someone how to act if their actions infringe on my, or my family’s, well being. What I can have is an opinion. However, what has become overwhelmingly obvious in our current, “information age,” is that many of the opinions you are subjected to on a day-to-day basis, whether live or online, are based on bias laden pseudo-facts masquerading as actual quality information. These, “facts,” are often harvested from the lists, or feeds, we reduce people to and create for ourselves by editing and carefully selecting who we, ‘friend’, ‘follow’, and ‘like.’ Anyone with opposing views or ideas are often muted or deleted. A quality debate, where both sides are well prepared with well thought out and researched points of view, is rare. Any debates that are had often devolve in vulgar name calling threads which are devoid of any substance and if any, “information,” is used it is often cherry picked and edited to an extremely narrow viewpoint. Our self created echo-chambers only reflect back what we already believe and remove any chance that our comfort bubbles will be popped. While it may be true that our culture can produce smarter machines that at any point in history it is also true that, despite having infinite information at our fingertips, people are becoming less informed than ever. Continue reading »