In Defense of Living in a Bubble

I unfollowed friends whose political views are different from mine and life is better

Much has been written about how media amplifies the political divisions in the United States. It goes without saying that the proliferation of news outlets that must compete for a finite set of eyeballs has driven outlets to take on ever more distinct political “flavors” to carve out a meaningful audience. Better to count among your loyal legions 80% of a right-wing Republicans or 80% of left-wing Democrats than an audience made up of 5% of the entire electorate, the logic might go. It has also been noted that social media likely plays a part in amplifying the polarization. It’s easy (maybe too easy) to light up the MacBook, logon to Facebook or Twitter and share your views with the world. Worse, your preferences with respect to the articles you click on or websites you view make it highly likely more of the same will be served up to you by the algorithms ubiquitous in the cloud. The result is the creation of a personal echo chamber where Internet companies decide what you will see based on what you liked to see in the past. Previous behavior is determinative; alternate views have little chance of being exposed to you. Why should they? The history of pleasing consumers is about “giving them what they want,” not helping them to think more broadly; not making them uncomfortable.

But much of the criticism of the corporate curation of what you read and view misses an important point. If you are like me, you have friends who play the spoiler – friends who have very different views than you and remind you of those views regularly (hourly?) on social media. They live outside of the binary world that feeds you more of what you’ve liked in the past. I have many such friends and they are pebbles in my social media shoe, perpetual irritants on my political path. For years I read what they wrote. Sometime they swayed me. But often they didn’t. I’d wind up in endless back-and-forths making what I thought were cogent arguments – although I never seemed to sway anybody, my powers of written persuasion apparently impotent. But for a long time, it didn’t matter. What mattered was I wasn’t one of those “bubble boys,” reading only what I wanted to, only what I agreed with. I was better than that. 

But as 2017 progressed, I found that reading the contrarian (at least from my perspective) posts was a net negative. They would get my blood pressure up. I would find myself writing lengthy responses knowing that if I hit “post,” I’d be in for an afternoon, a day, or weeks of online debate that went nowhere and took me from more important things. I would spend large swaths of time composing eloquent thoughts only to second-guess how they’d be taken by the reader. While I didn’t mind being provocative and challenging somebody with whom I disagreed, I knew that it didn’t matter what I intended; I couldn’t control how the reader would interpret what I was trying to say. And if there was an unintended interpretation, more stressful hours would be spent trying to correct things … no, what I meant to say was ….

So, a few weeks ago, I made a change. I unfollowed those that helped create this angst. I’m not blaming them. As I might say to them: “It’s not you, it’s me.” And you know what? Life is better. I know that many will read this and say that it’s not healthy to do what I’ve done. That it just makes things worse, more divisive. But does it? For those that don’t remember, there was a time when social media didn’t exist. A time when every political thought that entered your head didn’t have an outlet. And even during those times, there were bubbles and echo chambers – they were just in the physical world, not the virtual one. They were in cliques at school, in families, in country clubs, in universities. And when the bubbles were in the real world, they seemed less divisive. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are good things about social media platforms; they are tools that can empower and communicate in ways unheard of decades ago. But you don’t need social media to hear other views, to challenge your own assumptions. You just need the discipline to be broadly – and well – read. Pick up both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Read The Atlantic and National Review. Watch MSNBC and Fox. While you will find that you still disagree with what your read or watch, it’s easier to separate that disagreement from an individual if it’s not coming from … well … an individual. And de-personalizing the political, I believe, helps keep divisions from forming in more permanent ways. 

To those I’ve unfollowed, don’t take it personally. You are entitled to your positions and should continue to proclaim them from the digital mountaintop. You do admirable work fighting for what you believe, often in ways more eloquent than the professional writers and broadcasters at the organizations I mentioned in the last paragraph. But life seems easier, more fulfilling, and much less exhausting when I’m not feeling compelled to put my two cents in. Yes, we have big problems to solve. But while correlation is not causation, it seems to me that the problems got bigger, the solutions more elusive, and the vitriol more poignant when all any of us had to do to be “heard” was tap away on a keyboard. So, here’s a vote for going back into our own corners and living among ideological friends. Here’s a vote for living in a little bit of an ideological bubble. So long as both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal can be delivered inside of that bubble, I think the world will get better and we’ll all be a little bit happier.