[justindz]

This has been my basic frustration with what I call "YouTube logic," which seems to take this form:

1) Determine what you would prefer to be true. 2) Spend your time absorbing and referencing supporting evidence, at the expense of verifying its credibility. 3) When presented with contradicting evidence, spend your time dismissing or discrediting it, at the expense of verifying its credibility. 4) Re-affirm your belief successfully through willful or accidental intellectual dishonesty.

Perhaps there's a formal name for this. YouTube logic works for me, though, because that makes it sound appropriately juvenile.

[tokenizer]

I like Information Saturation. The idea that for some people, instead of using the internet as an intelligent, character building resource, the internet uses them with it's strong polarizing and insular force of saturating them with distractions and half-truths.

The individual may think they have choices of what to think, but ultimately the specific forum and/or resource may already be tailored to their biases. We even have our most popular English search engine, google, tailoring your biases at the discovery phase of research.

I can't remember the specific presentation, but I seem to recall an example of the search "Egypt", which displayed revolution in one user window, and vacation opportunities in the other.

If you think this is interesting, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo1qzjC_5xI