How Did We Get Here?

     Meanwhile, news organizations and university professors began to question the very notion of objective facts. New Journalists in the 1970s began to argue that everything is relative. Everyone’s view of the world is colored by their own experience. There is no Truth. There is only your opinion.

     As time went on, mass media carved the audience into thinner and thinner slices, tailoring their content to the interests of very specific groups. General interest magazines like Life and Look went out of business, replaced by specialized “lifestyle” publications. Then along came cable TV, again slicing up the audience to special interest groups. Gone were Ed Sullivan and Carol Burnett, replaced by the food network, the history channel, the shopping network, a dozen different sports channels — and the left-wing and right-wing news channels.

     The internet and social media have only made it worse. Organizations collect data, identify our interests, exploit our biases and enlist our sympathies — all to sell us products or win our votes. It’s a system, according to Lepore, that “manipulates opinion, exploits attention, divides voters, fractures communities, alienates individuals and undermines democracy.”

     Not all Big Data is bad. Computer-aided analysis helps build better buildings, safer cars, more effective medicines. It has opened up the mysteries of space, and can help us meet the challenge of climate change. 

     The problem is that we humans have a natural tendency to seek out information that confirms our pre-existing convictions, and we ignore or discredit information that runs counter to them. Or, as singer Paul Simon recognized many years ago, we all “hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.”

     So what does this have to do with Retirement, with older people? Well, we’re supposed to have perspective, and pass on our wisdom. We should know that modern marketing, polarized politics and mean-spirited media all benefit by exploiting us and splitting us apart.

     Younger people are less experienced, more credulous. We should remind each other, and tell our children:  Don’t allow yourselves to be “managed” into micro-markets just so corporations can sell more products or politicians can focus-group us into gender/race/class divisions to make us easier to manipulate and control.

     We should not let market researchers and political operatives tell us what to think or do. But it takes a conscious effort to resist these divisive forces. We can greet messages with a skeptical eye — especially those from “our own side” — and we can check facts. (Take a look at Bob Lowry’s excellent post at My Satisfying Retirement for some links to fact-checking sites.) 

    All knowledge is not biased. There are facts that are true beyond our own narrow views of the world. Or as Shakespeare said long ago: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”