This was the title of a book written by my late father. You can buy it on Amazon here, if you’re interested. It’s not my intention to say what this book means, or what he thought. In fact not many people like it when others say what they think, and I don’t think he would have either. If you want to know what he thought, you should read the book and come to your own conclusions, or maybe talk to some of his former students or colleagues. His thoughts are his, and mine are mine.
The purpose of this post is to talk about what I think the relevance of segmentation in our society is, both to this blog as well as the seed movement and democracy in general.
Information Bubbles
We all live in our own information bubbles. We all choose what information to read and acquire, according to our interests and the people we trust. Reading this blog, and this article, identifies you with one particular bubble. If you also listen to Fox News in the US, or the BBC in the UK, these are also information bubbles. Your profession, religion, education, ethnicity and many other factors play a role in the information bubbles you participate in. There are countless information bubbles all over the world, and seemingly more developing all the time. Perhaps more important, is what you choose to exclude from your information bubbles.
Labour is an important political party in some European countries, comparable to the Democratic Party in the US. Here in The Netherlands, the Labour party had similar problems to the US Democratic party, and is struggling to find relevance with voters. It was once a somewhat left leaning party, but in recent times has mostly capitulated to the more conservative parties, and no one knows what they stand for any more.
The Labour party commissioned a study into their recent electoral losses. One of the conclusions of the study was that society is becoming more fragmented, and they aren’t doing enough to stay sufficiently relevant, so people aren’t continuing to include them in their information bubbles.
The Rise and Fall of Television
The declining importance of TV, and the rising relevance of the Internet, has played an important role in the segmenting of society. It used to be that TV was a major influence in people’s lives, all over the world, and being a part of everyone’s information bubbles was as simple as paying for an advertisement.
Cigarette advertising also played a major role, because the money the tobacco industry invested in advertising paid for a great deal of public advertising infrastructure.
Now, everything from ad blocking software, open source software, downloading TV programs with the advertising removed, and the ability to choose which internet sites we look at (often based on advice from others), give us all a lot more control over the information we choose to let into our bubbles.
We still have companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and so on, which all play major roles in our news, choice of websites and what we choose to buy.
Bubbles as Membership and Labels
Participating in information bubbles can have very tangible consequences. For example, when you read this blog, link to it, comment on it, talk to others about what you’ve seen, mention it on Facebook, put it in your own words elsewhere on the Internet and so on, it can have a cascading effect.
Initially, I will see it in my log files if you read this site. This allows me to tell others how many readers I have, and if you leave comments others can see my readers are active. If things I write about become topics of discussion, others will find my original post in Google, and may become more active or long term readers of this blog. Even very passive participation can have a big impact on this blog. If you get in touch with me, and tell me what you think, you even have a chance to participate in the contents of the blog.
But also, once you identify yourself as a reader of this blog to others, then they know something about you. Just like if someone tells you they watch Fox in the US, you know something about them. You can like or dislike this blog, tell others, and allow them to develop their own opinions about you. You become a part of the community of this blog.
The same thing happens with every other blog or news site, or TV station. The same thing happens when you join or support other organizations or groups. I think this is an important way democracy works.
Importantly, you allow this blog to speak on your behalf! If you identify yourself as a member or participant, you generally support the positions of this blog, and I sometimes make assertions based on this blog’s topics and size of readership. This is true of any traditional media source, or any other organization.
Identifying Opponents
As well as finding friends within your information bubbles, and other like minded people, you can also use these bubbles to identify people who are working against things you believe in. Sometimes this is intentional, perhaps because of commercial interests, and other times it’s just people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes the issues are very complicated, and people make the wrong spur of the moment choices. It often requires thought and discussions with others to straighten things out, and above all it requires depending on people you trust.
This is a very important tool of information bubbles, and in my opinion as a society we are just learning how to do this. This is an important part of this blog, and related to my discussions recently on fake news.
It often requires resisting the temptation to pay attention to famous or well known people, who are possibly trying to turn their notoriety into money.
Tool of Democracy
Effectively controlling and manipulating your information bubbles are a very important part of Democracy. It allows you to filter out untrustworthy information, and to see the truth in situations. It allows you to identify and resist advertising, and prevent being manipulated by the wealthiest 1% who continue to have the power to pay for providing you with fake news and misleading information.
I’m going to post more about this in the future.
