Your information bubble is curated for you by advertisers – just do a couple searches on something in particular and watch how all the ads you are shown switch to match the interest “the system” thinks you have.
Your information bubble is openly curated by others, including various governments, and by the product the search engines decide you will be shown.
Then you own devices do some curation by using the cookies and other filtering features that are gathered at the device/client software level.
Oh, lest us not forget that your ISP and other parts of the internet can have a curation effect.
I’ve used curated, as the differing influences are filters, promotion, substitution, deletion, demotion, diversion, and all sorts of distorting of a normalized information flow.
Let’s not get too huffy about this, as some we crave and perhaps demand. We expect that our searches “imagine” (aka are contoured) to match geographics, controls (including family controls or NSFW respect), contextual bias (what are you usually looking at) and even filtering out spam/trojans/worms/exploits.
Where we do get huffy is that when we end up in an internet information bubble we never get the “real picture” in terms of our world, actual public sentiment or even to what level the biases have been applied.
We get a distorted and limited information flow.
Enter ham radio.
Person to person communications is one of the anathemas of information control. People tend to more often to tell about what they have seen or sensed, that is unless they have been put up to mischief.
That doesn’t set aside the biases that ham radio brings and some that it encourages. First bias is to be a transmitting participant you are expected to be licensed or you have decided to be a pirate station – either stature entails certain biases.
Next bias is demographic contextual, as the ham population is an uneven subset of of society as a whole. While in real life I have seen protesters with a cause, I seldom see any ham radio folks who also are part of those protests.
Another bias is educational, as hams in aggregate are largely drawn from those with technical or secondary education.
There are more “natural ham biases” we could consider.
But despite all these biases, hams are good at having what are basically face-to-face conversations held at considerable distances.
I learned more about how the unofficial banking in countries with hyperinflation works from ham conversations than I could find out doing repeated searches on the internet.
I learned more about how people survived under forced conscription and lack of resources from conversation with the techies in these war afflicted nations.
Do I always get the straight stuff, and are their observations drawn from enough information sources to be ubiquitous? Doubtful, so again I have to use my common sense to discern an accurate picture.
The ham advantage is I am less likely to be told propaganda recontexed as personal accounts.
Ham Radio Truth Serum?
Well I think that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it is likely that we inch closer to reality and truth when we minimize the purposely curated information bubble’s influence on our thinking when we include a lot of ham radio information flow.
73
Steve
K9ZW
With Varying Frequency - Amateur Radio Ponderings 