Collegiate Times

In my freshman composition classes, I ask my students each semester: do you believe politicians? The answer's always a fast and emphatic no.

In my freshman composition classes, I ask my students each semester: do you believe politicians? The answer's always a fast and emphatic no. Similarly, most of my students have a hard time answering the question what do you trust? The best answers stand timeless -- family, friends, faith -- yet outside that orbit spins a universe of things we either distrust or don't like enough to want to bother considering.

At the same time, as more gadgets are invented to make individual lives more cozy and insulated, we are, often without knowing it, giving up aspects of our community lives that have, historically, made us strong as a nation. Our country's motto -- translated from Latin as "from many, one" -- seems no longer to hold. We live in a "from many, many" time.

Four or five years ago there was a commercial in which an Eskimo, struggling in the middle of nowhere, discovers the ease of ordering stuff online. The commercial ends with this satisfied Eskimo sitting in a whirlpool inside his igloo, surrounded by the amenities of modern life. He was, we understood, totally content, king of his own material kingdom. Neighbors? Community? Dude's got his whirlpool and flat-screen; he's set.

In the last month, friends from across the political spectrum have, in conversation, relayed damning tidbits they'd heard about the current political players (Obama's Muslim; Palin said God made dinosaurs for the future's fuel needs). Most of my friends are relatively bright, yet many of them bought ridiculously false stories. It wasn't just my friends, either: legitimate news organizations reported these lies. How did we get to a time in which lies are not just disseminated, but believed, retold?

Think of that Eskimo. Instead of buying stuff online, imagine him, 2008, ordering news and information. We're all that Eskimo. Where we get our news has as tremendous an impact as what news we hear. This has always been true -- there must've been competing town criers when that's how word was spread--but it's never in history been this easy to literally live in your own world.

More books, movies and albums come out each year than any of us'll get to in our lives, and more news is reported every hour than any of us could get through in a day. When my students and I talk about the news, the most common complaint is that there's so much, that there's no way to keep track of everything.

Look around: We put on headphones and check out of the world around us.

And there is too much: There've never in history been this many options in terms of reading or finding news. And so we choose what to read, and with each choice, we both pick something and dismiss a thousand other things. Time is precious, paying attention is hard, and so spending an hour with a right- or left-wing news source typically means an hour not spent with its opposite.

Reading news we want from sources we agree with isn't bad in itself. The danger is that it's now easier to never ever listen to the other side, meaning it's easier to never ever be part of a larger We, part of any group that doesn't exclusively include those with whom we agree. That seems one of the greatest possible dangers. The last time we had this much of a divide between opposing sides in this country, this much of an I-won't-listen-to-that-side attitude, we went to war with one another.

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