The Daily Me
“The Daily Me” means going online as our own editor/gatekeeper, to select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. So what’s the problem?
Nicholas Kristof quite nicely sums up the danger of our self-selection of a narrow range of news online, in a New York Times column.
“When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper.
We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about,” he
notes, citing social science studies to back this up. He notes Nicholas
Negroponte of M.I.T. coined the name “The Daily Me” for our online news
habit and warns, “there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t
truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our
prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but
in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an
echo chamber.”
