The ability that social media has provided virtually everyone to have a platform to voice their opinion is something unique and will shape the future of many things. Pull open Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and you now have a stream of updates from your second cousin you never see to your favorite celebrities feelings on the news of the day. The amount of information that is accessible is endless, but just how much of that information we choose to access can be a real problem.  We select whom we follow and for the most part, whom we allow to follow us, this ability to customize the news or stories we take in can lead to an insular view of the world. Facebook has worked very hard to allow for the customization of your personal newsfeed. If a “friend” posts something you don’t like you can now mute them or hide that post. If they continue you have the ability to “unfollow” them or take the ultimate step and “unfriend” them. Each time we take an action the Facebook algorithm learns what we like and dislike, it will make a tweak to our personal newsfeed and try its best to show us what we want to see next time we are scrolling through the app.

This ability to customize our online news centers can lead us astray. If we are removing all the people and post about a subject we don’t agree with our view becomes single sided and we can trick ourselves into thinking everyone we digitally connect with has the same view as us. In an earlier post, I wrote about the David Dao and United Airlines incident that set off a firestorm for United of epic proportions. This event was also debated in class and one particular post caught my eye on how someone can think singularly because of the online narrative they may have created.

I don’t know this student and have never met them, but found their take on the United situation interesting. They reference four similar ideologies in order to make their point of how bad the situation got for United. And while there is no denying that it was a black eye for United, they emerged relatively unscathed. However, I can see if a person was mainly using the four sources of SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and The Daily Show they could have an entirely different conclusion than I came to in my post regarding the ineffectiveness of the #BoycottUnited movement.

How do we combat this and ensure we aren’t just getting a secular view of the world? Be open to the opinion of others; don’t just mute your friend because they said something you don’t agree with, acknowledge having a different opinion is okay. I saw this tweet in my newsfeed on Friday:

Friday Twitter tip:

Find 5 people you disagree with.

Follow them.

Think about what they say.

That’s how this all starts to heal.

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) October 14, 2017

Its pretty sound advice and something I think we could all benefit from doing.