Thought this was a very intelligent comment/discussion on reddit (shocking, I know) that people should be aware of and remind themselves of:
Quote:
Question: If you read Reddit it looks like Mitt Romney will never ever make it to the White House. But then you see the polls and they say he actually has an advantage. Reddit, are we creating our own distortion field or are we living outside the bigger one created by the media? (self.AskReddit)
Response:
Political Science major here;
Reddit is a news aggregation website. The basic premise is to upvote content we want to see, and downvote things we don't want to see. This personalizes content to our particular biases. You're inherently more likely to see pro-democrat comments.
This personalization has a really negative effect on how we are informed as citizens. Just by browsing Reddit, you'll passively reinforce particular existing views - and even radicalize them. Without any content to counter or challenge the things we want to see, Reddit essentially becomes an echo chamber. We hear what we already think because the website is personalized to us, and because we hear it again, we think it's right. This effect is vastly compounded if Reddit is your only source of news. Because there is no overarching content control, there is no pressure to supply the other side(s) to issues.
This sort of thing occurs all over the web these days for advertising revenue (think about how your search history is tracked by Google to tailor future results to things you want to see so you'll use them again), but in my opinion Reddit is one of the worst culprits to visit in terms of genuine discourse failure.
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Accusations against Fox and other media outlets are fair .. But, be wary of the possibility of a "reality distortion field"
here as well folks -- the world and reality has a habit of biting people in the ass when you ignore it. Oh, and bold emphasis is mine.