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Information Cocoon

I live surrounded by information I have carefully chosen to be compatible with my own beliefs and understanding – I live in an Information Cocoon and without meaning to be rude, I suspect you do too! It is something that is difficult to avoid, we have limits on our information gathering capacity in both time and money so why shouldn’t we spend our time reading only what interests us and the authors/sources we tend to agree with or trust? The danger (and I don’t use the word lightly) is that we close ourselves off from conflicting opinions and facts presented by other sources. By only consuming mutually affirmative sources we increase the intensity of our beliefs/understanding and further skew the range of issues and topics we’re familiar with.

I have tacitly realised this on several occasions but have usually shrugged my shoulders and accepted it. Today I’ve decided to make steps to rectify the situation. I’m going to add the Financial Times and The Daily Mail to my feeds (I might have to change the latter as I’m not sure I’ll be able to survive reading it for long!). This is a paltry step really… but what else can I do? Perhaps I should try befriending a Tory voter?

Posted on 17 Feb 2007

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