Neither far nor wide: Myopiademia allows few other sides

Round table will offer a forum for description, analysis, and discussion of mentally blinding effects of overlapping social psychological phenomena influencing decision-making and learning amid a fast-paced, updated multiply mediated information flow.

Confirmation bias, fixation, mental shortcuts, motivated reasoning, and online echo chambers have borne worldwide myopiedémie (myopiademic), as researcher Lamontagne calls the mental blindness epidemic.

The blindness to alternative points of view, solutions, change, has been internationalized. But because of its birth and growth online, it can be addressed online; it has been depicted as a “filter bubble.”

A background of “filter bubbles,” popularized by E. Pariser will serve as the shell of the presentation, a graphic of what happens when common social psychological conditions are manifest online:

Word associations and word clouds show the bubbling.

Five objectives:

1. Define parameters of myopiedémie, myopiademic, particularly as exacerbated during pandemic
2. Describe and define the filter bubble as a graphic description of myopiedémie
3. Evaluate online resources for objectivity via MIT Media Lab, Mayo Clinic, Lead Stories, FactCheck, ProPublica, and Snopes
4. Learn and argue an alien perspective, playing devil’s advocate
5. Understand how and why people of languages and cultures other than their own inhabit alternative, still-blinding, filter bubbles.