The Daily Me

This is an excellent op-ed article via NYT by Kristof on our own editorial choices of online reading, especially for news.While this idea is nothing new with more and more newspapers going the way of the modem we, the readers, will have more and more opportunities to ignore those opinions whom we don't support and surround ourselves with the ones we do. This is something Posmtan elegeantly forecasted in 1984 with his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death". The loss or degradation of what Postman calls a print culture based on the information derived from reading newspapers/books has been replaced by a virtual buffet that is not only bottomless but also stretches on for almost infinite miles into the tehcnological horizon. The problem with this is that for many people this is a transparent or non-issue. The loss of physically printed newspapers is not entirely a problem beause information has simply shifted to a different medium. The issue is not the loss of the paper but the loss, as Kirstof, states of being forced by proximity and the tecnhnology of paper to confront conflicting and incongrous ideas that do not immediately parrallel our own. The virtual culture into which we are vast descending enables us to build and inhabit enormously strong towers of opinion and one-sided thought that while based on legitimate sources will cripple us as thinkers and as we attempt to interact with one another.
So what next? Kristof suggests, dialectically, that "...the only way forward is for each of us to struggle on our own to work out intellectually with sparring partners whose views we deplore."
What does working this out intellectually going to look like? The question is if we as readers/thinkers have not supported newspapers which presented themselves as admirable sparring partners how are we to be trusted to pick out our own sparring partners? We have already demonstrated that we are not particulary good at taking blows to the head.