How Technology Closes Our Minds

The other day, I was just fooling around with Google , and I typed into the search box "I love my" to see what Google suggested for completion.  The first choice was "hair."  So, I went to the first page on the search results, and perhaps not so surprisingly it was a video of a Muppet singing "I Love My Hair."   Well, it was cute and all, but not really my thing.  It had been a long time since I had been on YouTube though, so I decided to check out my home page and see what other stuff there was to see.  And, to my horror, the suggestions for what I should watch were ALL Sesame Street Videos.  It took some serious effort to get YouTube to forget that I watched that video.

I guess the point is that Google seems to know an awful lot about what I've been doing on the internet, and perhaps worst of all, assumes that I really wouldn't be interested in much of anything else.  I'm constantly being served ads for places I do business with, and worse, places where I've done no business but visited the web site.  If I "like" a page on Facebook, I get all sorts of suggestions for similar things.  I can send friend requests to people who think like me, and I can block those that don't.  Twitter is pretty much the same story as Facebook.  I can "favorite" web sites in my browser so I never have to look beyond my circle of similar-thinking people.

And this extends well beyond the internet.  My television remote has a "favorites" button, so I can quickly flip to those channels that have programming I like, remaining unaware of whatever else there might be on television.  Music services that either stream music (like Pandora) or that allow downloads (like iTunes) also have mechanisms to make sure that you don't have to ever listen to anything you're pretty sure you won't like.  Even college courses tend to foster a closed-minded attitude, since most classes seemed to suggest that I should first formulate an opinion and then find information to back up my opinion.  I never did that; I generally used a question for my thesis, at least until I could form an educated opinion and not an opinion based on feelings.  I have, however, watched others form an opinion and then proceed to look for sources that appeared to back-up what they already thought.

By now, you may be wondering what's wrong with all that?  Why should I have to spend time sifting through a virtually unlimited amount of information every time I want to be entertained, learn, or find the truth about something?  To answer that, all you really need to do is look at the comments following most news and commentary.  It never takes long for the "discussion" to degrade into nothing more than name-calling.  This is a sign of how closed-minded we are becoming, and in my opinion, it will only get worse.

The unfortunate reality is that our society actually rewards closed-mindedness.  Many people seem to think that having an open mind means indecisiveness.  I've been told that I always "hedge" my opinions, when in fact I'm actually just acknowledging that mine is not the only opinion in the world, and may not be any more right than anyone else's opinion.  Here's an example, right from this post.  Earlier, I said that the comment sections following news and commentaries quickly degrades into nothing more than name-calling, and that this was a sign of how closed-minded we are becoming.  I could be wrong about that; after all, this sort of interaction hasn't been around for long, and perhaps it's just the ease with which we can interact, and publicly as well as anonymously at that, that gives the appearance of increasing intolerance.  But I truly believe that there is far more to what's happening than that.  And so, I'm going to try and make a regular series of posts on this subject in the future.  In the meantime, I'd love to hear your comments!  And feel free to look me up on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.