Outclassing social myths

What I read

In "The Myth of the Online Echo Chamber" (2018), David Robson says that "teaching basic critical thinking skills" should be one part of the solution to social divisions that often occur surrounding political issues. However, he also reports that the common idea that the Internet, especially social media, has made people's points of view narrower than in the past appears to be wrong: that social media actually helps users to get more varied opinions than they would otherwise expose themselves to. The experts that Robson cites suggest that more complex psychological theories are the real cause of deep divisions between groups in society.
(This summary of the long BBC News article is only 103 words, safely short of the maximum 130 words.) 

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My response 

As I was browsing the BBC News and my other daily sources the last few days, I was also looking for interesting articles to blog. Robson's article caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, he uses the term critical thinking, which is an important part of any class in academic English. At university or in any other academic context, we are expected to think critically about what is being said, not merely to listen passively and blindly accept what we are told. And this is a good thing. 

Related to my first reason is the fact that I was actually surprised by what Robson reports in his article. Like many people, I had accepted the socially popular idea that people who relied on social media for their news were likely to only see one side of an issue, the side that they already agreed with. It appears I was wrong, along with most other people, and when I'm wrong I like to have my false beliefs corrected. In this case, the correction is pleasing. It's good to hear that social media is not only not as bad as many people think, but might be better than traditional sources of news such as newspapers actually printed on paper. I wonder how many people in our class actually read newspapers or magazines in their original paper versions? I don't. Ever. I read a couple of newspapers and magazines every day, but they are all the online versions, which are way more convenient than the old fashioned paper versions were. AUA still gets paper copies of The Nation and The Bangkok Post, and I think they just clutter up the teachers' lounge. It is, after all, 2018 already. 

The other thing I liked is that Robson cites research for the surprising ideas he presents. If you go to my source ( = Robson's article), you can click to follow the links in it to the journal articles that report the research that supports the ideas. Unfortunately, I had accepted the common idea that social media were causing society to divide into isolated bubbles that didn't listen to opposing points of view or interact with each other, but I had failed to check whether this idea, which sounds very reasonable, was actually supported by the facts: it isn't. I was wrong. This reminds me of other popular social myths; for example, that if drugs are legalized, more people will use drugs and become addicts. The facts show that this plausible idea popular with many people is also false. 

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My question

How hard do you try to find opinions that disagree with your own? 

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Reference

• Robson,  D. (2018, April 17). The myth of the online echo chamber. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180416-the-myth-of-the-online-echo-chamber