We are all Slave now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I hear you. It isn’t much different from real life in terms of filtering what you see.

You are totally and completely wrong here. Years ago, we had a mainstream media. It was expensive to publish newspapers and to run TV stations, and they had strong economies of scale, so you didn't have many choices. People basically got their news from common sources.

Information technology has radically changed this. Anyone can publish anything on-line, in text, images or video, at little to no cost. Printing presses are now like assholes -- everyone has one (and when you have the former, you can be that latter). The revenue models that kept the mainstream media going have fallen apart. Google and Facebook make their money by providing individualized content, and everyone sees something different. There are no more common sources.

IMO, this is one of the biggest drivers of polarization. There is a historical argument (made by Benedict Anderson) that nations formed because of newspapers, which created imagined communities of their readers. Each person now lives in their own imagined community.