Breaking out of the bubble

[liv]

Most of what's going on in my corner of Google+ is... discussion about the awfulness of Google's so-called real names policy. There's a lot of speculation as to why Google, with their previously good reputation, is apparently shooting for evil and incompetent at the same time. One of the more plausible theories that's been proposed is that they want to reclaim the part of search territory where you find out what's going on in the lives of non-celebrity individuals. That is, if you want to look up your first crush or that guy you worked with years ago and see how they're getting on these days, you're likely to end up searching Facebook or LinkedIn. This harms Google's monopoly, because Google can't put its ads on those sites.

It also transpires that if you search while logged in to Google, it prioritizes results that it thinks are connected to people in your G+ circles. This, on top of everything else, is yet another huge Do Not Want flag for me.

So there's an intersection of privacy issues and, well, censorship issues. The privacy stuff is more important as a matter of principle; revealing people's personal information for profit puts people in real, physical danger. But the censorship stuff has more direct negative effect on me personally. Basically I'm in a position where I can get away with having my whole life online. It's a nuisance, I'd rather not, and that's why I put effort into keeping personal stuff (like this journal) separate from my near-unique professional name. But I'm not going to lose my job or be found by a violent stalker because of Google, so I'm complaining about it on behalf of other people who are in that danger.

However I really really don't want Google to mess with my search results! This tendency has been a problem for a while, but the whole issue with Google+ and the way they're pushing profiles is unquestionably making things worse. The question is, though, what can I do about it? I was already making a point of logging out of Google before doing any searches, because of vague concerns about privacy. One thing that G+ might well lure me into doing is staying logged in with Plus in another window, because there's this constantly updating stream of interesting stuff that just technically works better than either FB or DW. The conversations this week have convinced me that it's a bad idea to do that. I'm going to start handling Google with the same long spoon I've been using for FB: only access it from a separate browser, and use Chrome (yes, I know, ironic) in its "incognito" mode so that it deletes cookies after each session. (Incidentally, one of the conspiracy theories I've seen is that Google is banning "weird-looking" names deliberately in order to exclude power users, people who are tech-savvy enough to take this kind of precaution and tell their friends to do so as well.)

The problem is that I'm not sure this is good enough. I'm sure Google can get plenty of information from me when I'm logged out, given I usually search from the same computer and the same IP address, or from my Android phone and goodness knows how much data that's sending back to Google. Refusing cookies and turning off JavaScript would help a bit, but it makes using the internet painful and I don't think the trade-off would be worth it. This is a problem from the privacy perspective, unquestionably, but as I've said I don't really mind how much Google knows about me. I'm basically ok with accepting precision-targeted adverts in exchange for two really useful free services: futuristic search so awesome it seems like magic, and essentially unlimited online email. However, Google+ has started me worrying about how much of that data is going to get passed on to shady orgs, or in the worst case scenario even broadcast to the whole world. But the thing that's got me really worried is that Google is going to use the data not only to feed its advertising machine, but to serve me what it thinks I want to hear, not a true sample of what's on the internet.

Of course, this is a bigger problem than just Google. With the information overload of the modern internet, I rely just as much on recs from trusted sources to sift the material, as on simply searching. And that has even more of a tendency to just point me to stuff I already agree with. American blogger delux_vivens very astutely pointed out that, regarding analysis of the riots, people kept linking to penny red's essay [but] ...not seeing any poc blogging about it from england being bandied around. That's not even about missing perspectives I disagree with, but any perspectives at all from outside my mostly-white, middle-class social circles.

I think there's an issue of outrage addiction tangled up in this. My crowd (and I'm just as guilty as anyone) tend to link, reblog and retweet stuff that shows the bad guys being bad in a fairly uncritical way. InjusticeFacts, for example, which just accepts submissions from anyone who feels like "reporting" something and for preference uses grammatical English and throws in a few numbers. Or that satirical, made-up quote from Cameron about how he used to smash things up when he was a student that got reposted all over the place to show that the rich and the political establishment are morally corrupt. Or a thing that came up on my Tumblr feed declaring that Caterpillar is the most evil company in the world, because they sell bulldozers to Israel that Israel uses for bulldozing homes in Palestinian areas. Sure, it's reasonable to object to this, but seriously? More evil than companies who actually manufacture chemical weapons or sell arms banned by international treaty to regimes with much worse human rights records than Israel? I'm sure I've fallen for this sort of thing more than once, I'm sure there's plenty of bad things I'm outraged about that never really happened (and goodness knows there's enough real evil going on in the world that isn't getting media attention).

I'm finding it very hard to avoid assuming that the stuff I already agree with is in fact better than the stuff I repudiate. Obviously, that's why I agree with it in the first place! And I don't especially want to get my news and analysis from sources that are racist, homophobic, uncritically pro-establishment etc. I don't want to start supporting the Murdoch media empire in order to get a more varied philosophical diet! It feels as if outside my bubble is not the real, unfiltered world, but a bigger and more noxious bubble. For example I picked up a copy of the Daily Express that someone had left on a train, trying to be open-minded and not snobby, and what confronted me but an editorial as bad as any parody about how asylum seekers are living in luxury multi-million pound homes at public expense. If that's the alternative to a self-reinforcing cycle where I'm friends with people who already agree with me, and they recommend me things that will strengthen the opinions I already hold, I'm not sure that it's worth it.

Also outside the bubble can be genuinely a scary place. There are way too many people out there who quite literally want me dead because I'm Jewish, or think that it's a high ethical goal to kill my loved ones who are disabled. Not to mention the intense, scary enforcement of rigid gender roles; I really don't need a lot of insinuations in my headspace about how women just innately can't succeed in technical fields, or how fat bodies are disgusting, or how every shadow hides a rapist.

So, do you have any ideas, either technical or social, for how to get access to a wider range of opinions, views and perspectives?

Comments

[merrythebard]

I'm also not sure what the answer is.

And I don't especially want to get my news and analysis from sources that are racist, homophobic, uncritically pro-establishment etc. I don't want to start supporting the Murdoch media empire in order to get a more varied philosophical diet! It feels as if outside my bubble is not the real, unfiltered world, but a bigger and more noxious bubble.

This is very much my perspective. I think there *are* ways to expand my own bubble to include views and sources that are not-horrible but are also different from mine. Reading more blogs by BME people and working class people, for example. But, well. It does feel like every time I step outside my bubble completely I'm inundated with hatred. I'm disabled, genderqueer, queer, poly, left-wing, a feminist and FAAB. And a lot of people would and will hate me for all of that. Plus there's all the hatred directed against people who aren't like me, but who I also care about (which I try to mean, therefore, hatred directed against *anyone*). And frankly for the sake of my own mental health I'd *rather* stay in my bubble than cope with the hatred. I also think that people with our kinds of views can be too insecure about them. I've given thought and time and research and energy over a number of years to my views and opinions, and I'm allowed to hold them and not have to constantly defend them and debate them or feel that I'm somehow cheating if I read or share something that reinforces them - thus giving me confidence and comfort in holding my views and acting upon them.

It's also not hard for people in our kind of bubble to see and hear the views of people who disagree with us. A quick glance at the comments of most articles that I like does that pretty well for me! And, as you say, you only have to pick up a copy of most mainstream newspapers to be inundated with nastiness. What I think is much harder is getting the views of people who disagree with us but who are considered, compassionate and thoughtful people. The kind of people who won't write super left-wing blog posts, but who also won't write nasty trollish comments on super left-wing blog posts! And that I think is surprisingly difficult to do - especially considering that I know there are *lots* of people like that. Probably far more than there are either trolls or people like me. The thing I would most like at the moment is to hear other people's personal experiences, especially where they differ very much from mine. I might seriously disagree with what someone's extrapolated from their personal experience, but everyone's experience matters, and starting with the experience makes it easier to get into a compassionate rather than a judgmental headspace - and the latter is far too tempting so much of the time!

And that's the kind of thing that the internet ought to be good at providing, but often isn't. Livejournal and Dreamwidth, I think, are probably still the best at that.

I think my conclusion is basically this: *no one* is objective. No one. It's *all* just bubbles, and personal experience, and opinions that are to a greater or lesser extent well thought out and supported by evidence. So I think the right way of doing things is to find points of contact. Places where bubbles can meet without anyone getting damaged by it. But I think there's no need to feel guilty about not wanting to come into contact with the hatred of others.


I'm wondering how I'm going to manage to extricate myself from Google if they continue to be evil and incompetent. Not easy - they're kind of everywhere in my life.

Or a thing that came up on my Tumblr feed declaring that Caterpillar is the most evil company in the world, because they sell bulldozers to Israel that Israel uses for bulldozing homes in Palestinian areas.

!! That's just weird. I mean, I'm no fan of Caterpillar for precisely that reason, but the most evil company in the world??!!! That's absolutely bloody ridiculous. :-(


The InjusticeFacts thing is annoying. I know that some of their facts are correct, because many of them I've come across elsewhere on sites that *do* give their figures and references. But they really should have someone on site to check them. :-( I think in future I'll check any facts they give which I want to retweet, and then, if they seem bona fide tweet the reference after the tweet, and send an @ to injustice facts in case they then want to retweet *that*. Might train them into good habits.

[liv]

Thank you, this is really interesting and thinky. I think my problem is different from yours in that I tend to be a bit too confident in my opinions. I don't think people should have to constantly defend their views, but for me personally, it's good to be challenged. Just encountering views I disagree with (eg in comments sections) doesn't really help, because it's easy to dismiss everything as too obviously belligerent to be worth paying attention to. And yeah, people who deliberately post antagonistic comments on articles they disagree with aren't exactly the best representatives of the opposing point of view!

I think what I want is to be able to talk to people who share my core values, notably that all human beings are worthy of respect, but disagree about the details of how to live by those values. I agree with you that learning about different experiences is a good place to start, and in fact there's evidence that being exposed to differing experiences is more likely to change your mind than being exposed to arguments.

I agree that DW is quite good for this sort of thing, and I have a reasonably diverse reading list. But there's quite a high barrier to participation here. Partly because it's not really that user-friendly compared to a lot of more modern blogging sites, and partly because there's a sort of expectation that people will put carefully written, thought-out posts here, whereas more casual day-to-day comments go to Twitter or Facebook. And the structure of the site means that I'm a lot more likely to meet people I already have some connection to; this is a great strength for creating a virtual place where I feel socially comfortable, but less good for expanding the range of content I'm reading.

The truth is that I have moved quite a long way to the left over the last 10 years, and that's a lot to do with hanging out with and reading people who are more lefty than I am / was. I'm worried that I won't be that flexible in the next ten years, I'll just carry on holding the prejudices that I currently have, and simply dismiss anything that might show them to be wrong.

[emperor]

You can opt-out of targetted search results on google, AIUI. Under search preferences, perhaps?
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048

[liv]

Oh, nice one, thank you. I'd already done the Web History part, but I didn't know you could also get rid of cookie-based personalization when logged out. Let's see if I can more new stuff out of Google from now on.

[403]

For general search purposes, Bing's results are now of indistinguishable quality from a logged-out Google search. They haven't got a specific search tool for academic articles, though, and I'd really like to see one.

[liv]

Huh. I thought Bing was basically just rebranding Google searches. But it's good to know that there is a plausible alternative for search; for so long Google was just that much better than everyone else, there wasn't really a choice.

[ptc24]

merrythebard above has lots of useful points.

For me... I think that dealing with the mess of perspectives that my interests and my life and my social circles give me gives me plenty to be getting on with.[1] "Finding oneself in two bubbles at once and finding that those two bubbles don't agree with each other" - I'm not sure that makes sense or it's what you meant by "bubble", but it's a sentence which kept popping up. To a certain extent there's a chaining effect... "I like and respect her, now she's quoting those people and linking to their stuff with approval... WTF??"

I think there are particular pathologies with the internet, and you mention how bad newspapers can be. Books are good; being able to meet people face-to-face is good too. Spaces that don't primarily exist for talking politics, but where politics comes up from time to time, may be useful for broadening your perspective.

Oh, and distinguishing between things you can think critically but calmly about, and things that just make you angry, might be useful... (this is more a note-to-self than anything else).

[1] I have this constant background worry that something out of left field, some unknown unknown or something I'd dismissed as irrelevant, will turn out to be critically important. So "plenty to be getting on with" is me trying to be realistic about what I can actually hope to achieve...

[liv]

I agree that it's useful to join gatherings where you have a common interest other than sharing political views. That makes it much more likely that you'll meet people with a range of views. For me, being part of the Jewish community means that my circle is much more diverse, notably in terms of age and social class, than it would be if I relied on work and the geek set for my social connections. For example, I know quite a few actual Daily Mail readers, and they aren't hateful or stupid, they're just working class.

And yeah, I should read more non-fiction. The instant gratification of newspaper articles and blog posts comes at the expense of depth and actual research credentials.

It's a good point that part of the problem is identifying what topics are relevant and important, not looking at particular topics from all sides. I have no interest at all in having a balanced debate with climate change denialists or young earth creationists, for example, but it's the controversies that I don't even know exist, let alone have an informed opinion about, that I'm missing.

[lavendersparkle]

I think that I may be in a similar position. When I read the post the phrase that I thought of first was an opinion bridger, which I think is my social network research leaching out. I have such an unusual portfolio of beliefs, views and opinions that I have never met someone who entirely agreed with me. As I hold views that might put me either side of the 'culture wars' in most people's divying up, I end up knowing, and even politically campaigning with an odd mix of people. I also find that this in turn humanises each side to each other because, despite my tactlessness and forthrightness, people get the idea that I'm in some way OK and then that at least opens up the possibility that people could think x or y and not be monsters/just hate people.

For liv I guess the answer is to befriend some nice right wing people, but a possible way to do that is to find something which puts you most at odds with your liberal bubble and seek out people through that.

[pj]

I have no advice, but I did want to mention I find this to be an excellent and insightful post. Thanks!

[liv]

Thank you for the supportive comment! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[rmc28]

I realise just how much I'm in a bubble most of the time when people in my office, who are otherwise lovely and friendly and hardworking come out with crap about immigrants and people on benefits while having casual conversation about the riots last week. Or sometimes wildly prejudiced stuff about gay people (the unforgettable comment about a third party "oh, she's definitely a lesbian, look at her haircut").

Online, I try to keep at least some people that I don't always agree with on my follow lists (twitter, Reader, LJ & DW), as well as people whose life and experiences don't match mine. I read at least some of the Economist each week, for clearly-written news reporting that flags its biases, and also covers the whole world, not just the UK and US. (When I named my hens after female elected world leaders, the people who had heard of Dilma Rousseff or Ellen Sirleaf Johnson seemed to all be Economist readers)

[naath]

I agree about the Economist for a news source that's not entirely lefty-progressive but also generally calm and well written and stuff (I won't say they never say anything offensive, but I can't imagine them coming out and saying things like "all disabled people should die" or other directly attacking things).

I also find Al Jazeera English to have reasonably watchable news, from a different perspective to mine, although I suspect they may have rage-inducing opinions about Israel (I don't watch it a whole lot).

[liv]

Thing is, I work in academia which is full of people like me, basically. I remember we had about a half-hour conversation because someone said something that could possibly have been interpreted as meaning that a disabled child was a punishment for the mother being an obnoxious person, and it was very much about how that was totally not what they meant and emphatic agreement about how nobody should ever say things like that. Work is not as queer-friendly as my social circle, but nobody would be intentionally homophobic. I do get a bit of that sudden glitch in casual conversation at synagogue, though.

I think it's a good idea for me to actually intentionally read newspapers, rather than sitting here waiting for stuff to come to me via my friends' links to news stories. I might well look into the Economist, thanks for the rec. When I am not being lazy, I tend to try for news from different countries to increase the range of opinions. So Libération, Haaretz (English language, left-wing Israeli newspaper), Al-Jazeera, and I could probably add Dagens Nyheter, the main Swedish broadsheet. That would probably give me a better balance than trying to add the Daily Mail to the Guardian and the BBC that are always getting linked by my online contacts.

[ptc24]

I was reading something that mentioned the Economist a few days back, let's see...

From Language Log[1] a small quote in the middle of a post: "Nor am I criticizing the Economist, exactly — it's not only the best magazine in the world these days, it's actually quite good."

A couple of people disagreed in the comments, and had bad things to say about it.

Personally - I like the Economist for train rides or if it is open at a friend's house, I don't subscribe though. It doesn't seem to induce high blood pressure in me.

[1] I sometimes like to describe myself as a Language Log Reader, much as one might talk about a Guardian Reader or a Daily Mail Reader.

[khalinche]

I like reading The Economist from time to time; I appreciate that their stories can be both in-depth and also an overarching summary of things that I know nothing about. It's also a good way to come across comment and data from outside the bubble Liv is talking about.

It trips up, though, when I read their Latin America coverage and remember that it is often a pile of misinformed, biased tosh. Like anyone who knows a little bit about a certain field, I find myself asking, 'Do they get it this wrong with everything else as well?' In fairness, the only newspaper I've known to write stuff about my area of interest that I agreed with and couldn't fault was the Financial Times, so it's probably better to read the Economist and filter, and thereby learn about global events, than to stick with other papers and have to trudge through 70% of the articles before finding out about stuff that has happened outside of London.

[elf]

I can understand both the problem (am living in a bubble) and the problem with the most obvious solution (go visit other bubbles! Which are full of... idiots, and racists, and homophobic jerks and hey, isn't that why I found *this* bubble in the first place?).

I push myself out of the liberal-activism bubble by seeking interactions in venues only obliquely connected to politics/activism topics. I spend a lot of time at Mobileread, which is about ebooks & ereaders. I chat a lot about publishing news, device limitations, and the format wars, which is what the forums are for. However, as with any large forums, there's a lot of tangential stuff... a social lounge where people chat about *anything* ("what are you eating for lunch today?") and a politics forum that... is different from anything at LJ or DW.

What brought us together wasn't politics. The friendships that have been built, aren't about politics. So we find ourselves on various sides of debates of political issues with people we already know & respect from other topics.

RPG gaming communities: same thing--I can spend time in the community talking about my hobby, and when politics comes up, it gets a swarm of reactions from very different directions. There's some common traits among gamers, but they don't translate to any one style of politics.

Doesn't work for Pagan communities; those are overwhelmingly liberal with almost a tolerance fetish, except against whatever this year's evil buzzwords are. There are Pagans who don't fit the standard cliches, but they get shouted down; there's no open multi-opinion discussion of political-ish topics on Pagan forums.

TL;DR.

Short version: I get my wider-exposure news-and-politics from sites not designed for news-and-politics. If something catches me as important or relevant to me, I research it elsewhere, but I don't start at right-wing blogs.

[liv]

Yes, I think that's a very good plan, find people with whom I have something in common other than opinions, and that will expose me to a broader range of views. Plus it's a good way to meet people in general!

And yeah, following up stuff by doing my own research on it, rather than just passively accepting the links that my friends happen to post, seems worthwhile. Simply making that effort will get me out of the bubble a bit, even if I prefer sources that are somewhat aligned to my own views.

I don't think the Jewish community brings me into contact with a full spectrum of people and opinions, but it's certainly more diverse than the rest of my social life. The bits of it that tend to be politically conservative are generally also misogynist to the point that I wouldn't be welcome there. But at least I'm meeting people from babies to centenarians, rather than only my own generation, and it's not overwhelmingly liberal even if it does tend to be a bit leftier than the general population.

[pseudomonas]

Search-wise I'm using https://duckduckgo.com/ these days as default. Besides privacy/bubbling it has pluses and minuses compared to Google - the main pluses being explicit disambiguation of senses and suggestion of search refinements and the main minuses being the lack of integration with geographical/image/product/academic searches.

[liv]

Definitely bookmarking that one, thank you! I hadn't realized that there was any alternative to Google that's even half-way viable. Certainly worth searching both just to get a bit of a wider range. (I've never bothered searching both Google and Yahoo because the Yahoo search results are just so obviously worse that it's a waste of time.)

[blue_mai]

I don't entirely follow all the details about internet privacy and targetting - although the idea that google search should customise to things it thinks you will want seems so counter-productive it's a little absurd. The thing about bubbles, I guess, is just to mix (in real-life, on-line, or just by reading/observing) with a greater variety of people. I think it helps to not box/label groups up too much, it isn't "people that agree with you" vs "people who hold obnoxious/prejudiced views" - not that I think you do this, but there's a tendency for outrage stuff to reinforce this idea of things.
On-line, if you're in a circle that is self-selecting by viewpoint or social friendships, you will tend to be in one of your bubbles. But in a group that exists/self-selects for different reasons, you tend not to be in that kind of bubble. The most obvious is at work, but then people tend not to hang their opinions out, nor would you necessarily want them to. While on LJ/DW I my reading page is made up of people I've added because I'm either friends with them or I find what they write interesting, in contrast on other groups/forums, where I haven't chosen to add people, there is a much greater variety of viewpoints. There will always be trolls, and there will always be people whose views you find horrible, but for the most part people are there because they are social humans. People are there for the chat about, say, photography, or cycling, and they might share opinions in those areas, but little else. I do find it really interesting when there is a really wide range of backgrounds and opinions. When else am I going to be in the same "room" as all these people in real life?
Rambling a bit now, sorry.

[liv]

I think I wasn't clear about the privacy and targetting because I was mostly using it as a jumping-off point to talk about something else. There is some sense in Google telling you what it calculates you want to hear; for example, suppose it knows that in the past when I've searched for things to do with "pool", I always clicked on the results that were to do with the snooker-like game, and never clicked on the results that were to do with swimming pools, it would sort of be reasonable to put all the cues and balls stuff at the top of the search results next time I search for pool. Except that there are huge downsides: the whole point of using Google is to find new stuff, not go back to the stuff that I already know about! I suspect that this system is aimed at people who don't bother bookmarking stuff, but find their regular webpages by typing search keywords and genuinely want Google to come up with the same thing it did last time they made the same search. I wouldn't mind it so much if it were easily possible to turn it off, but it's not, it's a massive fiddly pain. Also there are privacy implications; in order to be able to do this, Google has to keep a massive amount of data on file about what kinds of things you search for, and I definitely feel uncomfortable about all that being aggregated.

I think you're right that it's good to mix with a variety of people, and not just put them in the obnoxious box if they happen to disagree. It's also a very good idea to join discussion forums that are about a common topic of interest or a hobby, and meet lots of different people that way. syllopsium said a very clever thing about how social networking has become people-centred when in the early days of the internet and before, it used to be much more topic-centred. So I think part of the solution to my problem is to deliberately seek out topic-centred discussions, as well as my usual diet of blogs which are written and controlled by individuals.

[feanelwa]

Thank you, I had been waiting for somebody to find what was wrong with Google+.

I've got to know a lot of people with different political views from me in the last couple of years through kayaking. I think it's getting an interest which is very much a practical physical thing, so it doesn't really filter people *at all* by political views except maybe if somebody was very racist all the time everybody else would probably get annoyed and stop talking to them. The importance of it being a practical thing and not an information-based interest is that everybody helps each other with things like carrying boats, so people who would end up shouting if they sat down and discussed things with each other can still get along and achieve something.

Plus, it doesn't have so much intrinsic selection by profession, ability with computers, book-smarts, etc. though it doesn't have many physically disabled people. Some, but they tend to have started the sport, made friends and then got ill and stuck around. And there are always children around so you generally have to be nice and polite to each other, but everybody is nice back.

[liv]

I can't claim credit for finding anything, it's people like skud and Sibylla who have been doing the serious research and analysis, I'm just passing stuff on.

I think you and the others who've made similar suggestions absolutely right that I need to build more social groups around common interests rather than shared viewpoints. The Jewish community is pretty good for that; people are there to accomplish something other than airing their opinions, and there's an expectation of being generally pleasant because it's a religious context (and because children and elderly people are present). But it isn't perfect, partly because of the amount of volunteering and leadership I'm doing, so I'm not really there to relax and socialize, and I'm not necessarily on an equal level with the people I meet.

I think I need to follow through on my intention to join a rambling club. (I would probably enjoy kayaking too, but I think I wouldn't be able to make enough of a commitment to it). That's a physical activity, with a relatively low barrier to entry both in terms of financial cost and educational attainment (other than the physical mobility issue, of course, but actually people with physical disabilities are not particularly under-represented in my mainly online social circle). And it provides plenty of opportunities for conversation even though that isn't the main point of the activity. Thanks for reminding me of that.

[hairyears]

Out-of-the-bubble information requires more effort than you expect. When I had the long commute to work, I read the Financial Times every day, and one other paper, one day a week - whatever I could pick up on the train, and always a different paper to the previous week's.

Yes, I read the Telegraph. And the Sun. I stopped reading the Grauniad because I found myself agreeing with so much of it - nodding along in a ritual of reaffirmation without learning anything new, and getting steadily stupider by rebreathing the stale air of the bubble - and I would've stopped picking up the Independent, but it is rarely discarded.

I read the Daily Mail, some weeks. All of it. Just because something is deeply distasteful, or a lie, shouldn't stop you reading: this stuff is the mental landscape of millions of Britain's citizens, and if I hadn't read it I'd have recoiled in horror and anger at the things I heard in Somerset country pubs last week.

I hate reading it: I can feel the lies seeping in, poisoning my attitudes, and I catch myself nodding when some skilfully-written propaganda trap leads me in... If I read it for a year, and my social circle was the stereotypical small-town golf club bores (or worse, expats), I would probably become a Daily Mail Reader.

Which is why I make a point of making air-holes in the bubble, any bubble, even a nice fluffy Guardian-reading Twitterati bubble. We're all susceptible to it - and there are some pretty unpleasant and illiberal prejudices lurking in London's leafy groves of Grauniaditarianism, among people who know nothing of their neighbours in richer and poorer parishes alike.

Actually, I should stop: that you've posted this at all shows you're well aware of that bubble, too. Possibly more so than I am.

My advice: find some harmless hobby with a regular club meeting that really does draw people from all walks of life. It's a rarity, but such things do exist: when our Aikido club moved out of the City to the East End, it became a healthy mix of people and a welcome social 'air hole'... But I suspect that such things are rare, and that you will have to look pretty hard.

[liv]

Yes, I think you're right, I need a hobby that will bring me into contact with a wider range of people. The Jewish community helps a bit, especially here, because I've found one of those increasingly rare pockets of mostly working-class Jewish life. Also my gaming group is actually pretty good, you'd expect people who meet up to play German-style boardgames would skew very geeky / middle-class and probably liberal-intellectual too, but locally this isn't much the case. At the moment I'm using up a lot of my hobby time going to the gym, which isn't very sociable but I think it is worth it for me to build up my fitness. Still, something I can work on.

Regarding reading material, I don't know. Yes, I do want to read stuff that I disagree with, but I don't necessarily want to put myself in the path of the Murdoch media machine. There are definitely quite powerful organizations that really want to influence me in particular directions, and I'm unwilling to let them into my headspace just to prove to myself how open-minded I am. Readers as much as writers are susceptible to the kinds of assumptions that lead to trying to have a "balanced" debate about whether climate change actually exists.

The Guardian isn't too pernicious for me because I can see how ridiculous it can be. The Indy, yeah, I'm more likely to just let it reinforce what I already think. The trouble with tabloids is not just that they're infuriating, but that I'm extremely biased against the sort of simple vocab and sentence structure they use. I'm unlikely to take the Mail or the Sun seriously because reading them feels like the mental equivalent of trying to chew candy-floss.

I think for me it's more useful to read newspapers from various countries, than to try and cover the spectrum of political opinion within the UK newspapers. That spectrum is extremely constrained anyway! I'm lucky enough to live in a world where there are plenty of English-language news sources available online, which includes in my pocket wherever I am. (I don't commute via Tube, so I'm never really far from the datastream.) So I think what I need to do is to resolve to read Libé and Al Jazeera more often, rather than the Mail.

[leora]

I think it can be difficult getting a good view on things. One of the things I try to do is kind of focused on the fact that I live in the US and am generally trying to understand US news, but maybe it'll have some merit. For large stories, I sometimes try to read sources from outside the US to get a new perspective. It might work similarly to seek out a few articles written in a few different countries. Even though I can only read English, I still find I can find a few options for large stories, and that can help. It's harder for more local news, of course.

This reminds me a bit though of a concern another of my friends raised that I think is valid. On the internet, it's very easy these days for some issue to become a big deal and to spread very fast. There can be a lot of people very angry over some issue, and they can get very mad at a corporation or organization or person or whatever. But there is a concern that the information spread may not always be fair or accurate, and once people do start spreading outraged posts on an issue it is very difficult to draw things back if it turns out people got it a bit wrong. I worry sometimes about participating in making people angry at a cause which may or may not be a good one. I want to spread information about good causes, but I don't want to create mindless mobs, even online.

On a less related note, I really like having my browser set up to allow me to turn on JavaScript on a site by site basis. So I can still use it where I want it, but have it off on other sites. I feel a lot safer using the web that way, personally. And I can turn it off temporarily for any site I want to, if I so desire. But I'm not sure if anyone has made an extension to let you do that with Chrome, and browsing that way is a bit more work sometimes. Although I should probably clean out my cookies more often than I do.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm not ashamed of being somewhat more interested in local news than world news, but I think it's good to have some balance. And yeah, being an anglophone gives you a huge advantage; the fact that Al Jazeera even has an English edition means I'm pretty lucky in what's available.

Regarding browsing safely, eh, I really should be more careful about JS and cookies, but I don't want the hassle of having to click through lots of security messages every time I load a new page. I'm not extremely worried about advertisers tracking my browsing habits.

The thing with outrage spreading faster than accuracy, I think it can be a problem. But I'm sort of willing to live with that possibility in order to avoid the situation where a person or org does something really awful and the people who are hurt by it see all their friends not really reacting or taking it at all seriously. But yeah, fact checking before reposting has got to be a good idea.