Wednesday, December 27, 2017

"One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases."

That's Barack Obama talking to Prince Harry (that's a NYT link). 

One of my favourite memories is of a friend of mine responding to the condemnation of a girl's ex-boyfriend by her father. After listening to this man run down all the faults—the instability, the lack of purpose, the general untrustworthiness—of this man, my friend turned to me, held her thumb and index finger about a quarter-inch apart and said, "He came this close to getting that one right." What she meant was that every fault this father saw in this man was actually true of his daughter.

I have the same reaction to Obama's comments on the internet. Up until now, people like Obama have had the privilege of living in world where only their reality got represented, where he and people like him got to live cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases. The media, academics and the entertainment industry were all on the same channel. Suddenly, he's been forced to face the fact that other people see things very differently and he doesn't like it one bit. He wishes these people and their contrary views could be made to go away or that they could at least be hidden away where he doesn't have to think about them.

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