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The World Isn’t in Chaos, the Internet Just Makes It Look That Way
Looking at sifted content gives a false perception of the whole
“So just drop the box in the stream and shake it around,” I told my son.
We were at Indian Echo Caverns in Hershey, PA. They had one of those things where you buy bags of “paydirt” which is just sand with a few gemstones sprinkled in.
The kid dumps the sand into the screened box and drops it in the flowing water. Then they shake it around a bit washing the sand away and they’re left with the gems.
It’s quite thrilling for a child, or even a grown child at heart like me, to see the gems revealing themselves through the fading sand.
I watched him sift the sand out and a realization struck me like gold fever.
That is the exact metaphor for almost all content we see on the internet or the news.
Only the shiniest, prettiest, bloodiest, ugliest, most interesting content is left after we sift out the overwhelming mass of sand that surrounds it.
What we see online is only that sifted content and if we’re not careful, we think the whole world is that.
My aunt asked me after I got out of the Marines and back from Iraq if I thought…
