• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • During my relatively long life I’ve witnessed journalism morph from giving information to forming opinion. Sometimes they do it openly, sometimes they try to pass it as the context you mention.

    I believe context is necessary now because of how fragmented people’s attention is. We used to have 5 tv channels and two main newspapers and that was it. It was easier to keep the focus and remember the context back then.

    Or, rather, we were all inside the same information bubble. Now everyone is in their own bubble, and there’s no more common understanding of reality.

    This conflict makes it super clear, because of its complexity and long history, that people don’t have the time or bandwidth to understand the whole thing and end up repeating what they hear inside their bubble.

    For example: your opinion is largely influenced by your location and your own history, much more than by the facts of the conflict. I come from Argentina, where most people support Israel, and I live in Ireland, where most people support the Palestinians. There’s understandable reasons for that. Argentina suffered two Islamic terrorist attacks against local Jewish institutions, while Irish people identify with Palestinians because of the British oppression.

    I personally live in my own bubble of course, we all do. I know my opinion is heavily influenced by my own history.

    As a consequence I end up getting involved in online discussions where I argue for nuance and against simplification, but that just puts me on the “wrong side” of both “sides”. So for my own mental health I’ve been trying to stop participating. I only wanted to chime in here because your comment seemed to capture some of what I think.