See (Only) What You Want to See
The internet has opened a torrent of information sources to us. Over the course of the week I read selected articles from several newspapers, pipe posts form about 50 different blogs on topics ranging form finance to marketing, to what my friends did last week , not to mention all the linking and Wikipedia reading that comes from all that reading. That said, this past week I’ve gotten worried that despite all the seeming diversity of sources I get news and analysis from, I’’ve just built the illusion of depth, a house of mirrors where I see a thousand versions of my own interests and thoughts refelcted back at me over the web.
This past week three things happened in the world:
- Israel raided a supply resulting ind deaths and controversy
- Wildfires in Canada blew smoke all over the NE US, including Boston
- A massive sinkhole opened up in Guatemala
I only heard about #1 through FaceBook. I guessed there was a fire from the smoke in the air, but I didn’t realize how big the wildfires were until I looked it up on a whim today. One of the blogs I read made a reference to the sinkhole in passing and I looked it up out of confusion.
These were all straightforward events, that I learned about almost accidental. I wonder how much news I miss. How many interesting thoughts I don’t stumble upon. How I’ve curated my own garden of sources, but am losing out on some of the crazy ideas out there in the untamed wilds beyond the walls I’ve built. Realistically, there is too much out there to keep up with everything, so I will have to accept that I can’t read it all; but when I don’t hear about fairly big news stories, I have to wonder if I’m building my news diet over unstable ground.