Facebook and Balkanisation of opinion: I have a very broad cross-section of people as FaceBook friends - people who have connected to me through different areas of endeavour - and recently the way I consume news had lead me to worry - increasingly, I find that I mainly read news items that appear on my FB feed, and less and less often do I read a newspaper as such. I get a wide variety of input from my news feed on FB- however, most facebook circles are I suspect more or less monolithic - and I think many people are engaging in similar news habits and fb usage patterns as myself - looking at FB links and items and shared videos from their news feed....and end up living in a particular bubble, inhabiting a comfortable world, that presents a skewed reality, where they are constantly reinforcing a particular world view, where there are few dissenting voices - be it a Roman Catholic one, an orthodox Jewish one, or an Islamic one, or one tinged with conspiracy theories, or focused on technology, or one that is completely secular and actively anti-religious. I get the whole gamut, and for this I am grateful to all those varied people who have become my FB friends.
