It Doesn’t Exist if a News Channel Hadn’t It Reported

How a person can construct an ideal world? Very easy, he only needs to read and watch news he likes. We can thank the availability heuristic, because if we don’t know something it is usually doesn’t exist for us. Often people put themselves into information bubbles, contemporary search engines and social networks are very good to help people create such bubbles. Anything that happens outside an individual bubble doesn’t exists.

People may willingly create information bubbles because the world around us is too big and too scary and too unexpected, therefore even scarier. Of course there may be good reasons to avoid certain news sources: is may be something too biased or something with too many fakes. Still I believe as every person live in an information bubble of some sort, we should at least take it into account. It also means that every person live in a separate world related to a personal bubble.

Imagine that your neighbor lives next door, but his world as he knows it is so different that he may be an alien from another planet for you. But do we need to act on it? If you want to better understand other people and communicate better with them, you should compare your own worldview with their worldviews. Often you don’t need to ask a lot of questions to understand someone’s worldview, you can check the news this person reads.

At the same time you should expect a number of biases to appear when a person finds some information outside of a bubble. Basically information from unknown sources would look foreign and hard to trust. Imagine that you got news about people living on Mars, would you care about them, considering they have no influence on Earth? When you decide to find some common ground with people from different information bubbles, this metaphor may appear not as extreme as it appears now.

You can use methods from critical thinking to expand your own bubble. People can’t make it disappear, but they can make borders more elastic and pliant. Understanding what exists outside the bubble can also help.