Ross Hunter, a former headmaster of an international school in Moscow joins the program.
Ross says that the reason why we are seeing a drift towards the atomization of alliances and individual societies is for two reasons: "one is overtly political; the other is the rapid change in society that nobody quite saw coming. Once upon a time, when families had one television, everyone had to negotiate who got to watch which programs. I'll sit through your soap opera if you will allow me to watch my football. Now that everybody has their own television or their own laptop, nobody needs to make compromises or to relate to other members of the family. Everyone's in their own room doing their own thing. That means that there is a loss of solidarity, a loss of mutuality, as everyone follows their own agenda which means you lose the experience and skills at compromising, seeing other people's points of view, and adapting to what other people need."
This atomization of relations could also have been said to be happening on an international level. "…If I can see only the bits of Facebook and only the bits of news channels I choose to, and they are different to yours, we lose any common territory. It's very easy for me to be in my own news bubble seeing the news that comforts and supports my world view, whereas you may be watching or listening to, or believing an entirely different world view, and we have no collectivity in what we have to come across. Globalization has made us more interdependent but has also fractured people's sense of self and group identity….We have become more isolated in our own bubbles." Host John Harrison says that we did nevertheless buy one newspaper over another newspaper, so we also, in the past, selected news to suite our mindset. Ross says: "To a certain extent, that is true. My first head of department, a very fearsome man, a little bit to the right of the Till of a Hun. You would have thought that he was a natural Telegraph reader. I asked him once: ‘Ken, which paper do you read?' confidently expecting him to say The Telegraph,' and he said: ‘The Guardian.' I thought that's strange. He said; ‘I know what's in The Telegraph, I could write it myself. I read the Guardian because I disagree with it, but it makes me think. It is an object lesson in making sure that I see other people's points of view….At least in the old days you all came together and watched the 9 o'clock news or the 10 o'clock news together, and that limited choice meant that you all shared a relatively similar dose of television journalism. Now multi channels mean that republicans in America can watch Fox, and never actually see any other contrary view….So there has been a chopping down of other the chance to see other people's view of interpreting the world."
Politics aside, the lack of necessity of having to see other people's points of views is a clear reason why the world seems to fracturing into smaller isolated units.
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