Until we stop feeding on seeing the world in ugly terms, we’ll feel this sort of divided. Media is just a reflection of what “we” want.
I've talked about this a lot, but I think this is just technology and the tribal human brain cooperating in a symbiotic relationship to destroy any sense of a cohesive society.
In 1970, everyone had three channels to get the news. Maybe the news was slanted one way or the other, but the entire country lived in the same reality, with the same facts. When you disagreed with your neighbor, you had different opinions and perhaps different analysis, but you both had access to the same prism within which to view the world, because they were the same.
In 2023, everyone has so many options to get the news that they may never even see the same prism as their neighbor. It's beyond the addition of cable news. It's YouTube and podcasts and social media algorithms. As I've said before, WAY too many people in our society construct a nice, comfortable cocoon of confirmation bias around themselves, and actively shun anything beyond it that might make them feel icky.
I know some people disagree with me, but I truly believe that it has led to people from "the other sides" living in completely different subjective realities.
It would be like if we were both watching a documentary on the Rwandan Civil War, in the native language of Kinyarwanda. Because neither of us speak it, we have subtitles. But you're fed subtitles that make the Hutus out to be heroes and the Tutsis out to be villains, and I am fed subtitles with the exact opposite. And then we discuss the film and you think I must be a monster for supporting the Tutsis, and I think you must be an imbecile for supporting the Hutus.
That's the world in which we live. We can't even begin to understand "the other side" because they live in a reality that we don't even experience. So we can't fathom how they could see everything we see and then believe something other than we believe; they must either be evil or stupid. We don't even consider that they DON'T see everything we see, and we DON'T see everything they see, because we've each constructed our subjective experience of reality to filter each other's viewpoints out.
Avoiding confirmation bias is hard, like exercise, and that's why so few people do it. Most don't even know what it is or that it's a problem.
