(no subject)
My discomfort with Media continues to grow, as I unearth more and more biases in the sources that I've grown to trust over the years.
I had to read both the Supreme Court ruling on DOMA and the Appeals Court ruling on the Gun Registration brouhaha to have any idea of what is going on; if I had trusted my usual media sources, I would have had an extremely skewed view of these events and their fallout.
I had a conversation with a friend of a friend in the US about political biases, during which he offered that he follows the most partisan news sources on either side of any topic, hoping that the Truth can be found somewhere in the middle. However, I feel these days that this may not be the right approach. Truth is not something that can be constrained by the bounding values of opposing opinions. It is not something that can be approximated by a flat projection, whereby POVs skew facts in predetermined directions.
Many higher-level problems that preoccupy me these days seem to implicate scale, and its impact on individuals. Our political will is diluted by the needs of representative government. We cope with the need to Be Informed through Faustian pacts with data intermediaries. We refine new online social environments that allow us to deal with a huge number of relations we feel compelled (or obligated sometimes, I guess) to maintain. Speaking yesterday to a few of C's friends at her wedding made me realize that a lot of other important things don't scale, and require personal reflection and effort. Self-knowledge, empathy/humanity (or "Physcianship", as a few Med students wanted to call it :P), ...
Time to have a productive day.
I had to read both the Supreme Court ruling on DOMA and the Appeals Court ruling on the Gun Registration brouhaha to have any idea of what is going on; if I had trusted my usual media sources, I would have had an extremely skewed view of these events and their fallout.
I had a conversation with a friend of a friend in the US about political biases, during which he offered that he follows the most partisan news sources on either side of any topic, hoping that the Truth can be found somewhere in the middle. However, I feel these days that this may not be the right approach. Truth is not something that can be constrained by the bounding values of opposing opinions. It is not something that can be approximated by a flat projection, whereby POVs skew facts in predetermined directions.
Many higher-level problems that preoccupy me these days seem to implicate scale, and its impact on individuals. Our political will is diluted by the needs of representative government. We cope with the need to Be Informed through Faustian pacts with data intermediaries. We refine new online social environments that allow us to deal with a huge number of relations we feel compelled (or obligated sometimes, I guess) to maintain. Speaking yesterday to a few of C's friends at her wedding made me realize that a lot of other important things don't scale, and require personal reflection and effort. Self-knowledge, empathy/humanity (or "Physcianship", as a few Med students wanted to call it :P), ...
Time to have a productive day.