Friday, April 9, 2010

The Internet: A Blessing Or A Curse?

Personalized internet filters are a great way to provide only the content each individual prefers. This seems very convenient and fairly innocuous concerning somebody's favorite types of movies and music. But what about tailoring an individual's news sources (most of which today is merely opinion and rhetoric) only to those that are preferred? What is bound to stem from this?

People become so identified with their chosen perspectives which only further reinforces the polarity of today's society. How then are we ever to settle life's most pressing issues?

In this regard, though we may exercise our freedom by listening only to those "news" sources that appeal to us, what does this systematically lead to? Enslavement to very narrow-minded perspectives. In this case, our freedom to listen to preferred news sources becomes a paradox in itself: ironically it leads to enslavement.

An interesting corollary to this is that one's perception of reality seems to become more “real” than reality itself, in turn exacerbating the already existing polarity causing more resentment, more hatred, more suspicion and other such destructive thoughts.

1 comment:

  1. If you haven't read Plato's Prison you should. He deals with a lot of the issues that your are raising questions about. Basically he made the claim that we are all prisoners of our own perceptions and until we can step out of that prison we have no way of knowing what is real.

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