A society divided by the information people get

As I wrote in my previous article “Changing style of information from passive to active“, the way people get information has changed. In this context, there’s a concern that people are going to get the information they prefer and member of a society are going to be divided more.

Since people are now accessing information not passively but actively by using google, Yahoo!, and others, they are searching the information they want meaning that they see less information they are not curious about than the situation before the Internet appeared. Certainly, there is list of news, for example, on the yahoo! headline, but as a current tendency people are now getting information by following the favorite sources of information on Twitter, be friends with on Facebook, and so on. This situation means people can follow the opinions similar to them and gather together.

And if the media having specificities like NewsPicks which is focusing on business news emerge more, people are going to be divided along with their preference of information. Diversification of media platform enable us to get more access to information depending on preference of each person, on the other hand it might divide a society by preference.

However, the multiplication of the sources has positive aspect as well. If the mainstream media try to spread propaganda, it was easy to spread in the past because people were accessing to information mainly from TV or newspapers, but now the way has become diverse and people are not easily manipulated. This is effective if a person uses several or more sources of information to get multiple perspectives.

In order to avoid being biased, we need to get multiple perspectives for a topic, or have places where we can get other opinions like in debates. If not, those who having the same opinions will gather, make groups with similar people, and people are going to be divided.

The Internet is practical and necessary in our life, but as people tend to search by their preference, there’s a possibility that the formation of people’s opinion will be made by getting favorable information to them. People need to have a habit of getting opinions far from theirs, otherwise our world would be divided by the information we get.