Hearing what we want to hear?

A few years ago I remember reading that the latest trend was “mass customization”.  In other words, instead of everyone having something alike, ie mass production, modern technology was making it easier for people to quickly and cheaply get customized things, such as clothes.  Of course, in my opinion this customization is rather deceptive, because you usually still have a very limited number of choices, even though the choices are greater than they were before.

The internet offers an increasing amount of customization.  For example, on a news site you can customize what type of news stories you want to see.  You’re interested in news about red-toed Costa Rican spider medicine?  No problem, you can just see news about that.  It’s a great thing, really, allowing you to sift through the thousands of news stories to ones that are important to you.

However, there are some unintended consequences to this.  More than ever you’re looking at little tidbits of information out of context.  In other words, the danger is that you see only what you want to see, or you get deceived because of a lack of the “whole story”.  The internet is so big that there is likely to be justification for your point of view out there.

For example, if you look for information on the “healing with echinacea”, you may only find those who are believers in the herb.  You’ll never see both sides of the story.  It’s a human problem that we have “itchy ears” that hear what they want to hear (2Ti 4:3).  The same thing happens when we hear certain verses over and over but never see how they fit in the rest of Scripture.

The future of news is speculated upon in a little 8 minute presentation called EPIC.  The presentation traces the history of news media from 1994 to 2014 (yes, that’s right) by Robin Sloane and Matt Thompson with music by Aaron McLeran.  If you’re interested, check it out, and ask yourself how you discover truth.  Follow this link and click in the white box to view EPIC.