How do we engage in other knowledge spheres outside of our own?
One might say, “Everything is just a few clicks away, right?” I’m not sure I would agree with that. I heard, second hand, of a report that says that Republicans and Democrats apparently stay on the same ’sides’ of the web as they do politically, offline. Danah Boyd once wrote her observations about class differences between MySpace and Facebook. I myself, out of sheer curiosity, have visited Aryan power sites – and I know these were just the tip of the ice berg for me as far as understanding views drastically in opposition to my own.
People still seem to only relate to other people and media familiar to themselves – not only offline, but online as well.
If these barriers do in fact persist, what does this mean for knowledge workers? What might be the larger implications of this for the way people learn about themselves and the world? What other perspectives exist? Are we just fortifying echo chambers?
