Many thanks to the splendid Ian Collingwood for this thoughtful counterblast to my last post: "This "circling of wagons" that you describe may be attractive, (especially
for marketers) but is it, in fact, socially damaging? Surrounding
yourself with "like-minded" people might feel good from the inside, but
really you're building an echo-chamber for your own opinions - and I
think that may be harmful to society as a whole. I'm not a fan of building walls, and I believe that it's not a huge
leap from "like-minded" to "narrow-minded". Already this is happening
in the real world - last week's Economist noted research showing that
people in the States are increasingly choosing to live amongst those
who share identical political views to themselves. I believe such
communities are likely to be socially impoverished (not to mention,
tedious and bland) and will tend towards the development of
increasingly polarised and intolerant viewpoints. This cannot be a good
thing in our current world. If this trend towards actively removing oneself from hearing or
seeing anything that challenges one's viewpoint is replicated online
through services like Facebook then I feel we will lose something
enormously valuable. The Internet has always been a place for vigorous,
challenging debate. Long may that continue". Open ID for you then Ian...? ;-)
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