This is an ill-advised rant that is just thoughts and based on conversations with people in my life rather than any actual research. I'll likely delete it but I'm just feeling a certain way and need to write it out so that I can get past it.
I'm so sick of hearing that people understand information bubbles. It feels like a straw man, that thing you mention at the beginning of an essay of I'm acknowledging that some people say x, so as to lend some apparent credibility to my entirely ignoring that in favor of what I want to say.
Acknowledging that information bubbles exist is not the same thing as understanding them or seeing your own.
How is it that I could write a list of wedge issues and know for a fact where my brother and my mom will fall on every single one of them? How is it possible that people raised in the same family structure the same socio-economic structure the same geographical location, who had access to the same education, who have had all the same privileges of their race, whose core morality is so similar would fall on opposing sides of every single one of them?
Isn't it strange that each of them are able to believe starkly in an agenda that contradicts itself? Shouldn't, if one were to go to the core of each issue, people who advocate for gun rights and abortion rights be on the same side of the argument? Both are about personal sovereignty and the ability to protect oneself from an overbearing government or other outside threat. Is there not some disconnect that disallows people on either side of both arguments to see that rationale in the other? What makes them both cling to stories of the worst perpetrators abusing their rights, yet be able to accuse the other of doing so without seeing it in their own arguments?
How is it possible that a country as vast as the United States of America can be split into two parties? Yes, those parties are 'diverse', full of factions and co-opting by their most vocal and and opinionated members, but if one were to poll the average voter from both on that same list of wedge issues, it is likely that their answers would be the same as my brother and mom's.
How does that happen? How did we make that decision? I refuse to believe that it is because democrats are soft and republicans are cruel. Often people who try to define either party as such are misdirecting you from looking too closely at their own.
People seem to think that the information bubble is just about what slant your news has, but that is only the first piece of it. The biggest, that I've seen, is frequency. It is not just how an issue is discussed, but how often an issue is discussed. What is that mark of demarcation? What takes a story from an oh that is such a weird thing! to this is a problem threatening our children and our country? How many articles and sound bites and podcasts are required to galvanize a base? How many single sentences from 250 page reports are required to convince whole swaths of the population of dangerous misinformation?
Brainwashing is a term that is used lightly and often, as a way of separating ourselves from those that we deem radicalized. In some cases, to horrifying results, it is absolutely true. But to use it so liberally (ha!) is harmful, because it allows us to presume an intellectual or moral superiority which only furthers the chasm, and makes the gap that much harder to bridge.
I know I know, the irrational man says meet me in the middle and you take a step forward and he takes a step back. I get it. I am not equating anything. I am firmly on one side of each of those wedge issues and nearly all of them fall along party lines. I am not superior, I am susceptible, but I am trying, and I wish more people in my life were doing the same.
