Improved Communication Makes You More Open Minded

The conventional wisdom has been that with increased education and travel, you are exposed to a variety of different ideas and cultures. This makes one more open minded, and more tolerant and accepting of new ideas.

It has been an item of faith that this is what the tremendous improvement in communication brought about through cell phones and the internet would do. With better communication it was thought that compromise, tolerance, and understanding would increase, gradually leading mankind more in the direction of world peace.

Recent research suggests strongly that the exact opposite is what is happening. With the modern wonders of the internet people can easily search out other people with ideas which are very similar to their own. What seems to be happening is rather than learning about the ideas of cultures different than their own, and thus becoming more open-minded, people are closing themselves off to other viewpoints. Through social networking sites like Facebook and others, they are surrounding themselves with people who have ideas very much like their own.

The resulting feedback loop is not moderating us, or making us more tolerant and open minded. Rather we are all becoming more narrow minded, intolerant, and radical. The political center is vanishing.

In the bad old days you read the newspaper, and it forced you to view a variety of different ideas. Now thanks to the magic of cyberspace I can tailor my news so that I normally read intellectual and liberal news like the New York Times, and I block what I view as racist or right-wing propaganda.

And with the internet people who have ideas which have very shaky intellectual backing are being viewed as normal. Look weirdoes like at Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reiley.

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