On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 5:29 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been thinking about the whole issue of 'filter bubbles' and their > various effects, including the death of serendipity, the inability to see > things (like e.g Trump) until they hit you in the face and, more > philosophically, cutting oneself off from many potentially interesting > people and ideas. > > How do people here deal with this? As a start point, when was teh last time > you changed your opinion on something non-trivial, and how did that come > about? > Hm. Religion. More than 180 degrees. From religious (Christianity, to doubting, to recognising the validity of other religions, to atheism to fierce atheism. This started with questioning prayer, questioning suffering. Post social media (and I include blogs and social networks) it is more whatever-helps-you-sleep-at-night-just-don't-shove-it-in-my-face-and-please-please-please-don't-kill-anybody. Sexuality and gender. Thought the first was a choice, a depraved one, and that second was, well, obvious. Then a friend came out to me. And I started reading a lot more. Some of my thoughts on gender have been shaped by social media though. Feminism. From the old-fashioned chivalrous stuff dinned into me by family to a sense that one shouldn't discriminate on gender, which came from just being out in the world and meeting more people, to, I guess, a kind of #NotAllMen. More recently, and this is because of social media interactions, to a view that patriarchy is a cancer. Reservation / affirmative action. From anti to pro. From coming to an opinion that a level playing field isn't enough when some groups aren't even in the maidan. Rather like my views on feminism. Some of this was social-media-influenced. My Indianness. I'm of mixed heritage. I grew up reading books by white people, and the names there were like the ones of family and friends. It took some time to register that scones or baseball were not exactly my lived experience. It did take a long time to start reading Indian fiction, partly because I could never find my hybrid experience in them, partly perhaps because its awkward when people with names like yours are the bad guy. A lot of that changed when I started blogging and found a sense of community with Indian writers. Still don't like most Indian popular cinema, though. Art. I don't have the vocabulary to describe this well. A transition from respecting only the photo-real is the best I can do. Started with dating an artist for a bit. : ) On filter bubbles, I do try hard to seek out alternate opinions on social media. I made lists of people with views different from mine, but whom I regard as intelligent and civil. Those are usually my go-to lists when I do check social media, which has become less frequent now because of the toxicity, the polarised views, the lack of nuance, the lack of grace and respect, that one finds online. if anyone's interested, there was a discussion on Twitter a couple of years ago that I Storifyed: https://storify.com/zigzackly/changing-one-s-beliefs and also a similar, more nuanced discussion on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peter.d.griffin/posts/10153541899357235 (I recall Sidin leading one similar Twitter discussion more recently. Sidin?)
