Wired Up, Plugged In, Zoned Out

As mentioned in my previous post, I haven't been spending a lot of time with the newspaper lately. But I was looking through this past weekend's Globe and Mail, and found the article above (linked from a site that didn't insist on breaking it up into five annoying pages, take note G&M) which I found very interesting.

The article expresses concern about the growing prevalence of "egocasting". This term refers to the way that new technologies allow us to increasingly filter out all views, sources, and voices that don't align with what we've already decided we believe about the world. So lefties tend to subscribe to RSS feeds from lefty news sites, and conservatives do the same. TiVo allows us to select our preferences and never have to flip through anything we aren't interested in. The ads we see online are increasingly tailored. We seek out reflections of ourselves.

In some ways, this is a great thing. We have incredible access to like-minded people, and to information about the things that interest us. Our time is valuable and so tools that help us to filter through the noise are hepful.

But the concern is that we are losing any sense of a common culture, as well as our collective appreciation for the role of differing viewpoints, and constructive debate. Christine Rosen suggests that this  trend of egocasting increases polarization in the political spectrum, because people aren't challenged to consider the voices on the other end. And the blogosphere allows us all to reinforce our beliefs, and hang out in our respective "echo chambers".

I think this article is worth a read (and a second link). My sense is that there is a degree of reaction by a traditional journalist to what must seem a threatening wave of change, but there's also a lot to think about.

I want to believe that new technology in communications is going to help us evolve and find new and better means of collaboration and have access to more and broader ideas than ever before. But, as I admitted yesterday, I have been rather dis-engaged this election, and I think it is in part because I am able to fill up all my "news" time with stuff that is interesting to me, and that has nothing to do with the election. If I relied on a traditional newspaper for my news, I would not be able to avoid the coverage and the debate.

Any reactions out there? Fear mongering, or insightful commentary on Consciousness 2.0? I'd love to hear what you think.

I must confess that I have not really been following along this election. I've been interested and engaged in every other election for the past 5 years - municipal, provincial and federal - but this time, not so much. And it's probably mostly because I spend too much time online, reading blogs, learning about social software, keeping in touch with people, and NOT reading election coverage.

So I was happy to learn (with a week to go) about Confeederation, an aggregator site built by Social Signal, pulling in the blog posts from all the blogging candidates from all the parties. Nice work, Rob and Alex... it's an awesome idea.

So I'm stoked... now I can inform myself and still not stray too far from my iBook! :)