My Opinion (@wired)

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems in society is the polarization that is occurring because people can choose what they want to believe, largely stoked by electronic media, aka The Internet. From Wired, “Benghazi Report Shows the Internet Is Killing Objectivity”:

It is the beauty and the tragedy of the Internet age. As it becomes easier for anyone to build their own audience, it becomes harder for those audience members to separate fact from fiction from the gray area in between. As media consumers, we now have the freedom to self-select the truth that most closely resembles our existing beliefs, which makes our media habits fairly good indicators of our political beliefs.

People on the left and the right always want to rush to proclaim how the other side is wrong, corrupt, stupid, untrustworthy, whatever. How many people will actually read this 800-page report? How many will read that as well as previous findings? How many have even a little knowledge of military operations to understand what options were feasible, what intelligence could have been clear and what may have been unclear, the timeline, the geographical and logistical issues involved, etc.? Then, how many will try to sift through all of that and actually try to determine where responsibility for this tragedy lies? My guess is almost no one has because it actually takes effort and time. Yet everyone in the media and on your favorite social networking site will talk endless shit about it.

We should feel comfortable voicing an informed opinion. But an uninformed opinion is irresponsible. We should have no qualms admitting that we don’t know enough to comment on something when we have not done the research.

Categories    Politics    Technology