David Bell makes a good case that current intenet reading habits cast a different light on the role that The New Republic once played: In the personalized info-feed that makes up more and more of my own daily reading, it has become rarer and rarer to encounter arguments that challenge me to think in a fundamentally different way about an important issue. Hardly surprising, since so much of it comes to me from like-minded friends. Being to the left of center, when a right-wing article or blog post pops up in my feed, it usually does so with some sort of mocking or outraged comment attached by a friend or editor, or from a self-appointed watchdog of the right like Media Matters, or, for that matter, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Many more articles that find their way to my screen simply confirm my ideological preconceptions. I myself deliberately include points of view different than my own on both my Twitter and my Facebook feeds, precisely to shake up my ideologial preconceptions from time to time. When we didnt otherwise have the means to get access to these points of view other than by subscribing to conservative magazines, for liberals TNR at one time tried to play this role within the magazine itself, while remaining ostensibly liberal. Perhaps that is why I did subscribe to it for as long as I did. https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/new-republic
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 18:52:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015