Public knowledge

[dsrtao]

On the one hand, there are things that anyone could find out -- that Diebold election machines are easy to rig, that airport security contains more security theater than actual precautions. On the other hand, there's stuff that people actually learn and think about. The two are not the same.

One problem is that attention is valuable. Another is that many people have sacrificed choice for convenience. Allowing a proxy to select news for you is common: newspapers are proxies, TV news is a set of proxies, SlashDot is a proxy. If you let one proxy dominate your attention, or one set of proxies with similar biases, your information flow will be biased as well.

People seem to like that. Question answerable by Google but not to be found by Googling: to what extent do people add RSS feeds that were mentioned in existing subscribed feeds, vs. no immediate connection?

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

People have always preferred a recommendation from an already-trusted source; friends in particular, even if those friends don't have obvious skills in that area (asking a friend for a recommendation about a carpet cleaning company, for example.)

I wouldn't expect very many out-of-the-blue RSS feeds. Some without an obvious connection may still be an effect of past recommendations, years or decades in the past.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I know I've done that, but the problem with adding in-feeds is redundant information. I rarely read /. any more, because it has become a bottom-feeder, a merge of other sources I've already read (and will less intelligent commentary).

Proxy bias may be comforting, because proxies can provide a cohesive picture by consciously or unconsciously filtering information. It's really hard to overestimate how comforting it is for many people to be surrounded by the familiar, by things that hang together logically in precisely the way the world does not. The danger is when people forget the bias, or hubritically think that their information diet is not slanted.

I think your first paragraph describes "the media" pretty succinctly...