I talk a lot in my classes about the bubbles in which we all live. I joke a little about the purple bubble that we live in at TCU, the bubble of Fort Worth, the bubble of Texas, and bubbles of religious faith, musical genre, gender, etc. I talk about my older daughter's wish to get out of the bubble of Texas, to try the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C.
At her university (University of Maryland), the word "bubble" actually appears on the name of its journalism school's multimedia lab. And it seems very apt, since journalists and all professionals live in a bubble, too, that they've created and then continue to pass along these bubble ways to college students. That's what all professional schools are, in a way. Humans are quite simply makers of bubbles.
There are links in this blog from April about Plato's cave allegory, which is the ancient version of the bubble. Plato thinks that a chosen few can climb out of their bubbles, to become philosopher kings.
Here's a link from one of the TED talks, about bubbles, shared with me by student Kathryn Waggoner. It details how the internet creates bubbles around our search and social media activities, much like our brains create idea bubbles.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/22/pariser.filter.bubble/index.html?hpt=C1
Labels: bubbles, Plato cave allegory, TED
