Quote:I think you all are onto something with the technology. The very nature of the online news experience is that it is more personalized than ever before. In the 1970s and even 80s, you had fewer choices in where you got your information from so most people were working off the same general information. Once the internet gets to know you, you get stories that reinforce what you already believe or have shown interest in. Instead of at least hearing the other side and using your brain to sift and filter information, you get to live in an echo chamber where your own ideas are parroted back to you and it plays on your confirmation bias. Eventually you get to the point where any news that you might hear that doesn't fit inside of your values system, you will take it as evidence of left/ring/corporate ect. bias and you will defend your own echo chamber. Of course while all this is happening, people are shutting themselves off to anything else and so they drift to their respective corners of the political spectrum. 

 

I believe that it goes deeper than that.  Technology starting in perhaps the late 1980's along with poor education has generally made people more "ignorant".  In general, most people aren't taught to think for themselves, they are taught to memorize.  They are also "taught" that there is only one correct way to come up with a solution to a problem.  Math is a very good example of that.  When adding up say five 3 digit numbers manually we are taught to add up all of the one's then carry over the extra digits to the 10's and so forth to come up with the answer.  However, a different method can be used to come up with the correct answer by adding up the 100's first, then the 10's and finally the one's.  Both ways will still give the correct answer, but the second method is considered "wrong" in grade school when taking a test where you have to show your work.

 

Many people, particularly the younger generations are dependent technology such as google or a calculator application on their smart phones, or what the computer that has become cash registers tell them.  There are scores of people that couldn't actually run business transactions handling money and making change without technology.

 

Now expand that example on a greater scale where you have technology and media constantly displayed in front of you.  News websites, blogs, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter put content in front of people at a very rapid pace, and people believe whatever they see without doing the actual research.  The technology is carried around in our pockets in the form of smart phones, or on tablets, laptops, desktop computers or on our TV.

 

There was a saying that I heard a long time ago from a marketing professional that rings true to this very day and can be expressed as a math equation.  "Successful Advertising = ((what you say x how many times you say it) x (who you say it to))".  Think about that.

---