What constitutes today’s iteration of the well-informed individual? No aspiration to be a polymath genius, just an intelligent and worldly aware thinker. Do we expose ourselves to an adequate variety of information sources? This self-examination is a personal quest for the making and maintenance of a reasonable mind. This quest should be conducted without prejudice, or ignorance concerning additional and perhaps unconventional sources with which to form a balanced perspective on any issue.
Do we have an obligation to embrace social media, as if to neglect it is to overlook a segment of the media landscape? Is an Instagram or even Facebook account an essential part of the mosaic that informs us, or do we doubt that this medium will lead to matter? We push back against a socially mandated responsiveness because a generic someone has determined how we need to spend an hour or two every day of our lives.
Constantly at the behest of confirmation bias for efficiency of effort, we trim our information sources to those we get on with, enveloped in the availability heuristic. It is challenging to question if the inputs we allow into our consciousness are of sufficient depth and breadth to create an opinion that can be defended fairly under fire from contrarians.
What can be said of extreme contrarians like climate science deniers and anti-vaxers? Are their information sources narrow and skewed? Most likely they are. Yet they offer no sound rationale why they should be believed over those who are informed by a wider, credible and generally accepted range of opinion. A public figure like former PM Tony Abbott declared climate science is crap and contemporary politicians such as Matt Canavan promote fossil fuels. They should be obliged to say why their sources are superior to others. They express tributary positions as distinct from mainstream and inevitably finish in a swamp.
Most days I will read Crikey online and print some articles I may want to refer to later. I do this also with Pearls & Irritations, Medium and New York Times. I subscribe to New Philosopher and Australian Quarterly print editions. I have membership of the Australia Institute, Centre for Policy Development and the Ethics Centre. I buy a Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday (and during lockdown, a Sun-Herald on Sunday). I flirt with the idea of subscribing to the UK magazine Prospect but haven’t yet taken the plunge. I have also looked at National Times and Michael West Media for alternative views.
Further inputs to my intellectual health include participation in a Socratic Society, with weekly discussions of stimulus readings. Infrequent postings on my website Awesomely Astute round out my mind’s activity. I am also engaged, somewhat laboriously, in researching and writing a biography of a feminist in my family’s heritage.
I read and make a record of what I’ve read. I buy books and borrow them. This reading fodder is both fiction and non-fiction. For fiction I indulge only a little in ‘who dunnit’ books and am continuing a retirement obsession to read all of Dickens’ novels. For non-fiction I read lots of philosophy, politics, essays and history and am a latter day convert to behavioral economics. For real-time examples I have just read Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words and am now into Tom Keneally’s The Dickens Boy and will next get into Richard Fidler’s The Golden Maze and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit.
Despite being retired my time is limited so choices are made. I read very little of the views of right- wing protagonists, which means studiously avoiding the Murdoch press and television. I do watch a lot of ABC news, especially during the Covid19 pandemic. I have so far neglected podcasts but appreciate they may offer an interesting source of information. I am not sufficiently tech-savvy to use a range of phone apps to advantage. Tell me what I am missing by such oversights. Enlighten me.
What do you read, listen to, watch, livestream, or search for on the internet? What have you zoomed lately? Do you feel you have nailed sufficient inputs to inform your own thinking? Are you able to counter encroaching bias? So go on, I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours and tell me if my selection is too this or not enough that. This is a conversation worth having to see what nourishment we are feeding our minds in order to be truly woke.
Awesomely Astute 