To become better grounded in reality of the more literal kind, we need to stop regarding the media as our only avenues to a significant world, and begin treating them more as supplements to our direct experience.
This may require some retraining in the way we approach both experience and opinion.
Currently, we tend to judge the relevance and merit of what we and other people have to say largely by their conformance to what’s presented by the major national media. This is not a promising way to break the media’s virtual-reality hold over us. It also produces more than its share of odd speech and reasoning.
For example, in our interpersonal, real-world talk to one another about public affairs, we have developed a habit of flatly telling one another, "Nixon did this" or "Clinton did that," when we are really only saying what we have surmised from third-hand news accounts that offered no direct proof, and often only suggested what the public figure may have done.
At the same time, in contrast to the overconfident presumption of our pronouncements on events about which we have no real knowledge, we are curiously shy about our own personal experiences, and the original insights and opinions we have derived from them. To the extent that we express our opinions to one another on social matters at all, we seem to be much more confident wrapping ourselves in viewpoints that we have picked up from media celebrities in newspaper columns or talk shows or the like.
If we have anything at all to add to the public discourse, it is surely not a mere recitation of some media celebrity’s Name Brand Opinion, or a clumsy oversimplification of a news event with which most people are already familiar. By any sensible measure, our own unique and personal observations are what we really have to say.
Why can’t we manage to share these more with one another?
Undervaluing our own thoughts and experiences is only part of the problem. We also need to talk to somebody who is interested in them. Many people today have become so accustomed to regarding what they see on TV or read in newspapers as "the big time" that they are dismissive of evidence they didn’t hear on the news, or of public affairs topics that are not fully media-certified Name Brand Issues.
If we look hard enough, though, we can often still find people who are interested in exchanging more personal viewpoints that are better grounded in literal reality. Moreover, today’s technology can help us find them essentially without regard to geographical distance.
As an example, the Internet and its service providers such as America Online now provide a number of public affairs discussion forums. To be sure, the discussion on these sites is not immune to the media-centric biases that afflict society as a whole. Sometimes their dialogue may even sound as if had been lifted whole from The McLaughlin Group. But there are enough genuinely independent and original viewpoints expressed in such forums, and enough of a cooperative approach to jointly puzzling out what’s happening in the world, coupled with a shared sense that the process represents a healthy alternative to the bigger media, that the potential of these sites cannot be disregarded. To some extent, such forums could actually come to supplant portions of our existing news media.
But to expect too much of computerized communications in this regard would be as unwise as heaping too much blame on the media for putting us out of touch with literal reality. The media are, after all, only delivering audiences to advertisers, by telling us the kinds of things we want to hear. When and if we change what we want from them, they will change what they present to us.
