There’s a quote from a professor in an article in the Arizona Republic titled "iPod Era of Personal Media Choices May Be Turning Us Into an iSolation Nation that I think highlights the dangers of listening to an academic make pronouncements about the cultural impact of, well, anything related to the real world.  Here it is:

"What concerns me is that we are developing an information
segregation," said Jeffrey McCall, a communications professor and media
watcher at DePauw University in Indiana "People are ending up exposing
themselves only to the ideas, issues and entertainment that suits them.
And I don’t think that’s healthy in the long run."

What universe is this guy from?  People have always segregated themselves and they have always segregated their information, no matter the medium.

To give you just one example take the newspaper scene in Washington, DC.  For years there have been two papers, The Washington Post and The Washington Times.  Ask any native of DC and they’ll tell you that the average Post reader is likely to be liberal and perhaps a little elitist.  On the other hand they’ll tell you that the average Times reader is either a staunch conservative, black or both.

Look at TV news. We haven’t always had the "conservative" media like Fox, but we have had choices.  Back in the day you could often be classified by the broadcast news you watched.  Were you a Cronkite guy or a Brinkley gal?

All we have with the new media is a lot more variety, more complexity and perhaps more defined segments to choose from.  So what if you TiVo your TV programming now?  That just means that instead of going to the fridge during a commercial you fast forward through it.  So what if you listen to your iPod instead of the radio?  That just means you find your music through avenues other than the 50 or 60 songs being rotated ad nauseum on the radio.

Sounds to me that Mr. McCall is a member of the camp who feels that we need to be nannied to death.  We can’t possibly enlighten ourselves, we must rely on someone else to do it for us.  But that ignores the other great human trait we all share and that is curiosity.

As I said people have always segregated themselves but we’ve also always been a curious lot.  Anyone who argues that just because we can choose what we want to hear or read and thus will never find "new" music or ideas has obviously never been stuck in their car listening to the same mix CD for a few hours on end.  We’re human, we get bored and we’re constantly on the hunt for something new. 

The almost infinite number of choices at our disposal are a great thing.  We now have an idea of how much we don’t know, the scope of what we may be missing.  I’d argue that with our curiosity piqued we will actually broaden our horizons.  Sure we’ll still be looking for those pundits we agree with and for the music we already know we like, but in the process we’ll more than likely discover something new that we like more than we ever expected.  What could be better than that?