Living in a bubble?


    As I was growing up in the 80s in Nepal, I remember we had black and white television, which did not have remoter control. So you had to walk to the television and turn on the knob to change channels. However, my parents could not afford to have subscriptions to the channel, so we could only watch Nepal Television which used to run from 5 pm to 10 pm. There used to be a program called " Bishwo Ghatana," which loosely translates into world affairs, and as the name suggests, it would sum up what happened around the world in that particular week. That used to be one of my favorite programs on television as I could take a glimpse around the world, and it would also help my imagination about the outside world I have never seen. 'So there was no real-time news. In retrospect, running that kind of program in those days must have been laborious and challenging without the Internet. 



   If I visited my grandparents in the village, the radio was the only source of entertainment and information. So we had to clue what was going around the world. It would take at least a week to circulate the major news like war, change in government, and natural disasters to travel to even to a capital city like Kathmandu. People living in rural areas would not even know about the news. So we were all living in our tiny bubble. 



    Fast forward to today, we all know real-time news from all over the world. The Internet and smartphones have made it possible to know what is happening worldwide in real-time. We have an influx of information coming towards us every second. At a glance, we have broken all the barriers in communication via fiber optic networks and satellites. 


    However, if we dig deeper, did we break the communication barriers? Did we burst bubbles and be open-minded enough to listen to new ideas, accept alternatives, and reason? Absolutely no. We went from having no information at all to too much information. We are still in our bubble. All social media platforms are virtually stalking us and feeding us the information we like while filtering out the information we are unfamiliar with. I am more isolated than in my days of radio and black-and-white television. Nowadays, we are less likely to reason and listen to people who have different backgrounds and come from walks of life. Because we are programmed from all the feeds and news we receive daily to favor familiar and dislike even hate what is foreign to us. The bigotry and pettiness have reached toxic levels, and we are deaf to the people on the other side of the aisle, even though they might be right. The success of being able to put us all in our bubble and not being able to come out has been done deliberately by tapping into our basic instinct as humans to fear of unknown and also by hindering us from tapping into our conscious. This has been going on colossally for financial and political gains worldwide. There is no concept of absolute truth anymore, and the truth is relative. And My truth is different from your truth!





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