“Your repudiating social media sources for gathering news is one example of this” should read “Your repudiating SOME social media sources…”

Also, I want to stress that my comment is not supposed to be endorsing some sort of subjectivist view. While we are constantly interpreting, there are certainly some methods that are more sound than others, even if our foundation for these judgments cannot be called “true” in the strict sense that many use the term (esp. when discussing which news sources are better than others).

So, if a source allows you to engage with others who are familiar with the same terminology as you and the general course for parsing the information at hand, then this facilitates discussion and can lead to a richer understanding of the topic at hand. This gets more complicated the more sources we consult and allow to enter into our go-to set. There are repercussions, but there are also rewards — as you mentioned in your original post.

Your post seems plausible to me, especially if we examine what prima facie seems like a less controversial assertion: It’s OK to get your news from _familiar_ sources. When poked at, however, this seemingly innocuous assertion raises a set of inter-related, causal questions including, but not limited to the following:

(1) Did I let source (x) become a part of my go-to set of sources because I liked what source (x) had to say in terms of matching up with beliefs I already held?

(2) Did some other feature of source (x) cause me to frequent it more often than others? For example: source (x) uses syntax familiar to me because it is similar to that which is used by source (y). But sources (x) and (y) relay content from disciplines which do not have any crossover.

The result of (2) may have caused me to develop new beliefs, or discover less reflected-upon beliefs.

If I may risk over-interpreting your post, I take you to be espousing something similar to Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. All along, the concept of inauthentic gerede is contextualized according to the assumption that there is an opposing concept: namely, authentic discourse. Of course, SZ doesn’t follow that trajectory, and instead asserts that we can have only inauthentic gerede; there is no other possibility, much less an authentic alternative.

We can resist becoming extremely troubled by the content of your post if we acknowledged that what it means for source (x) to relay “true” information is much more complicated than a simple true-false binary. This does not mean, however, that we cannot evaluate the credibility of sources, or that we cannot judge some sources to be better than others. Your repudiating social media sources for gathering news is one example of this.

In sum, our beliefs are not the result of collating bits of “raw” data; there is no raw data. So long as we have available some standard to follow in order to, at some point, measure the success or value of one standard to another, then there is no real reason to decry keeping your set of sources close to home. None of us operates in a vacuum, so this doesn’t necessitate that consulting familiar will result in a perpetuation of unreflective thought. (In fact, the more sources we have at our fingertips–the more information and possibilities we have–the less afraid I am at making such statements.)

Please ignore this if I’ve been too incautious with my interpretation. At any rate, I think there is merit to what you are offering here.

There’s a Heideggerian in all of us, deep down.

Colleen

[Must restrain snark, risk/reward, reward/risk, no benefit from it ...]

Eh, I’ll end with that, on risk/reward basis.

“We all dance around the circle and suppose. The secret sits in the middle and knows.” Robert Frost

The more I re-read that bit from Frost, the less I understand it, but as a hobby-horse epistemologist, I like it all the same, personification of “the secret” notwithstanding.

First of all, I own your book, Too Big to Know. I put it right up there with several other contemporary classics, like Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman) Here Comes Everybody (Shirky), and The Black Swan (Taleb).

That being said, when I ran across your Twitter entry and then this blog, it struck a note with me. I’m a contrarian chameleon. I start from the assumption that all information sources are biased, and partake of some at different points in the spectrum, fallaciously trying to confirm my biased assumption.

Naturally, if I read Huffington, it’s likely that I’ll get a completely different mindset from the folks at Fox. Knowing where the two examples here come from helps me to recognize bias in both sources, and to separate fact from opinion from bias from spin. I’ve found that by refusing to hold either in much respect, I can more fallaciously form an unbiased and fence-sitting viewpoint.

Though I’m (hopefully) not as old as you(!) , my years of experience here in the South have shown me that everyone’s opinion is much like their taste in food, that is, sacrosanct. I’ve run into just as many biased South Disparagers as I have biased southerners. Nine times out of ten the bias is a result of limited experience and excessive assumptions.

Every once in awhile, someone comes along who is both intelligent (easy to find) and honest (much harder to find) about their assumptions and biases. Fortunately for me, most of you write books.