Brooke Gladstone, an award winning journalist, runs a weekly show on NPR called On the Media which highlights how the media shapes our perceptions on reality. There was an interesting point made early on that facts are facts but everyone's reality is different because it is based on your perceptions, what facts you have accepted (and what you have not), your personal history, and so much more that makes each of us unique. We can all observe the exact same thing but it will be incorporated into our unique realities differently. And our reality does not like to change, it does not like to accept new facts that show that something else we believe to be real is actually false. And this is where the trouble with our current reality in our country comes from. Now is a time when we must try to find the ties that bring us closer together, have dialogues, and learn how to reach out of our own reality bubble, to break through it, and figure out how our reality coincides with that of others to form a reality formed in facts that we can agree to. In the past, the basic facts and reality were not seriously in question and now everything seems to be. Until we can agree on basic facts, we cannot come together as a nation or a world. She talks about how easy it has been to manipulate people and compares much of what we have been going through using the lens of many different authors (I cringed a lot at her thoughts on Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World since my thoughts mirrored hers in many ways when I first read those books several years ago). This was a tract and not a full book so it took less than 2hrs to read although I think I may go back and read it again in a few months to keep some of these thoughts more fresh in my head.
Page count: 97p/15,693p ytd/286,825p lifetime
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