I never much cared for Jay Leno, but I always had to grudgingly admire his "Jaywalking" bit, where he would take a camera out somewhere and quiz people on questions they ought to know (like, who is Joe Biden). Of course, if you ask enough people an easy question, eventually you'll find one poor sap who doesn't know the answer. And after enough filming you can edit together just the saps, and then--voila--you've made the general population of Los Angeles look far more uninformed than it actually is. It's a simple trick, but it makes for pretty good TV.Something I've been starting to notice, though, is that this same mechanism will often be at work on the internets. What happens is, you end up regularly reading blogs that more or less reinforce your worldview. And these blogs take it upon themselves to hold the other side accountable for their words and actions--as they should--and so they call out offensive and ignorant quotes from the other side and scathingly tear them apart.
And all this is fine, as far as it goes. But what happens is that, after a while, you start getting a very skewed picture of what the other side is all about. The mess-ups, the poorly phrased statements, the idiots--that's what you get exposed to, just like a Jaywalking segment. And, you know, it's entertaining.
But over time this sort of thing just stifles any kind of meaningful exchange of ideas across the ideological divide. I mean, is it really intellectually honest or useful in any way for Andrew Sullivan--who has the most popular political blog in the universe--to call out a whackjob comment in some arbitrary right wing blog somewhere?
(Photo by Xurble)
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