There’s something quite insidious about social media these days. Perhaps it’s accepting the reality of living life through a technological lens? The lack of privacy that you have when broadcasting to the world wide web that you’re finally trying out that new bar downtown? Maybe. Just, maybe.
But, a quiet, sneaky ideology is upon us in this modern age— and it has little to do with security or what filter you post on your selfie before uploading it. This particularity lies completely in your hands. This ideology is the tailoring of your news.
For example, when you go to set up your ‘News’ app in Apple’s iOS, you get to choose from a plethora of topics, and then with that choice, Apple curates a completely unique news feed for you. This, in all retrospect, sounded like a beautiful way to receive relevant news. However, the dire reality of this is that anyone with an iPhone or the likes of it has the ability to hone in on specific sources. While this may seem like an amazing way to read only the most relevant-to-self news, the insidious nature comes in the form of algorithmic news.
Thus, our news feeds are filled daily with only the sources that we chose to curate from. This, then, culminates itself into a reality of Facebook home pages full of entirely skewed rhetoric. And while the beauty of being a human with a unique mind gives us the inherent perk to choose what to read, the entire basis of many arguments is increasingly received from personal soliloquies and those political rant statuses that you never click ‘read more…’ on.
The social impact of others in today’s political realm is monstrous. It leads to a monster that far surpasses the simplicity of statements. More and more, the reality of tailored newsfeeds leads to an internet society that believes that all rhetoric is canon.
The amount of political reality in the face of social media is astoundingly low. In a news outlet world of algorithmic matching and personal preference, we lose the reality of the political world. By simply checking into one source, we lose the tactility of reading from multiple view points, and often find ourselves receiving news in whatever the form is that we first see on our news feeds.
We lose the reality of political science by investing instead into the vernacular of what becomes comfortable ways to receive news. The reality of the matter is that the pool of information becomes lost in a sea of tailored algorithmic feedback. We essentially lose the ability to see multiple viewpoints, data, and formats that differ from our lives. That, folks, simply isn’t real news.
The reality of the matter is that we, unlike the good ‘ole days of not having news tailored to us, have to revert ourselves to news that makes us uncomfortable. News cannot perpetuate itself into something that the reader prefers over the reality of current events. What we write cannot be viewed as canon unless it is empirically based on reality alone. Basically, in order to understand the world holistically, the confines of social comfort have to be shirked. By no means am I advocating for a complete lack of social networking—instead, I implore everyone to make sure to open up narrow scopes of reality in order to see the world in its entirety. That, my friends, is where social awareness and change are kindled.
