In the classic 1999 science fiction movie, The Matrix, most humans live in a completely simulated reality (the Matrix) while their body heat and electricity are harvested to produce power for intelligent machines. The main protagonist, a computer scientist named Neo, is given the opportunity to see reality outside of the simulation when a rebel leader offers him a red pill. Choosing a blue pill, on the other hand, would return Neo to his previous reality. Neo chooses the red pill and the movie progresses through his action-packed fight against the Matrix.
The major premise of Accountability Citizenship is that changes in our information environment over the past 50 years have radically changed the skills necessary to process information and formulate reasonable opinions about current events. One doesn't need to imagine a matrix-like conspiracy to acknowledge that deregulation of television and radio
along with the explosion of gadgets from personal computers to cell phones exponentially increases the amount of information presented to us each day, You might, however, still believe the information that comes to you is random, and that is highly unlikely due to something called a filter bubble, first described by Eli Pariser in his best selling book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Pariser presents examples where different users executing the same search on the same platform are served results that are significantly different, and he asserts the different results are a function of marketing algorithms that essentially create a little structured reality for each of us. There are a wide variety of views about how pervasive or how serious the effects of the filter bubble are on social discourse... and you are probably being served the view that is most consistent with what your personalization algorithm says you will like!
Of course, with a little effort, you can escape the bubble, and www.AccountabilityCitizenship.org offers you some assistance in this regard. The way out of the bubble is with a relentless pursuit of the facts. As indicated in the quotation from John Adams, facts are indeed stubborn things. For all things, we should actively seek a foundation of facts that has not been selected for us by someone else. The book Accountability Citizenship suggests a methodology for building such a foundation, along with a number of reasonably impartial sources of information. AccountabilityCitizenship.org itself strives to be such a source, presenting both sides of most issues we cover in our newsletters and being clear about our biases when we choose to present an opinion. Go ahead, take the pill. We need you out here...
The major premise of Accountability Citizenship is that changes in our information environment over the past 50 years have radically changed the skills necessary to process information and formulate reasonable opinions about current events. One doesn't need to imagine a matrix-like conspiracy to acknowledge that deregulation of television and radio
along with the explosion of gadgets from personal computers to cell phones exponentially increases the amount of information presented to us each day, You might, however, still believe the information that comes to you is random, and that is highly unlikely due to something called a filter bubble, first described by Eli Pariser in his best selling book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Pariser presents examples where different users executing the same search on the same platform are served results that are significantly different, and he asserts the different results are a function of marketing algorithms that essentially create a little structured reality for each of us. There are a wide variety of views about how pervasive or how serious the effects of the filter bubble are on social discourse... and you are probably being served the view that is most consistent with what your personalization algorithm says you will like!
Of course, with a little effort, you can escape the bubble, and www.AccountabilityCitizenship.org offers you some assistance in this regard. The way out of the bubble is with a relentless pursuit of the facts. As indicated in the quotation from John Adams, facts are indeed stubborn things. For all things, we should actively seek a foundation of facts that has not been selected for us by someone else. The book Accountability Citizenship suggests a methodology for building such a foundation, along with a number of reasonably impartial sources of information. AccountabilityCitizenship.org itself strives to be such a source, presenting both sides of most issues we cover in our newsletters and being clear about our biases when we choose to present an opinion. Go ahead, take the pill. We need you out here...
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