When I was growing up I have lots of memories of listening to the news, radio shows, and more on the family stereo in the afternoons. When we drove across the countryside it would be the AM radio since that’s all there was (apart from throwing rocks out the window at distance marker signs and re-reading the same book over again because I didn’t bring enough with me). Because my dad listened to these shows, so did I, and no doubt I developed quite a bit of my personal world view, sense of culture, and values from this exposure at a fairly young age.
It was also where I first heard the amazing radio plays that the BBC put together like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I love the books, but the production values of those shows were just incredible.
At home, once we finally put a TV in the living room (we started out with the TV in a tiny “cubby house” built into the ceiling space of the house and accessed through a ladder in the laundry - not sure why, maybe locking away the dangerous technology), it was mostly the ABC (the “A” is for “Australian” for those with their own ABCs) and SBS (affectionally known as the “Soccer Broadcasting Service” rather than the real name) and the occasional current affairs show before they turned into sensationalist slop sometime in the 90s.
I would ask my serious little kid questions, and my dad would answer in his carefully considered serious dad way. I see a lot of him in how I talk to my own kids, and although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I hope they also come to appreciate complex and messy answers that fit the real world, just as I did in time.
What my kids miss out on is the shared media exposure. This really hit me when I was going for a morning run while listening to a podcast. We have our own devices, I use my headphones, the TV in the living room rarely gets used as such, instead just being a screen for the Switch and the Apple TV most of the time. The news is just a website or app that becomes a funnel for personal preference (no sports or pop culture thanks) and is silent. The kids get their own kids shows which, although we tend to steer them towards content that has some sort of value, still doesn’t tend to push the boundaries of understanding.
Our kids are curious, which we cultivate, and tend to like reading non-fiction for lots of the reading program books they bring home from school (which also saves them from the incredibly tedious stories in the fiction books) and we still get lots of good conversations around biology, geography, and cultural diversity there. They watch and discuss Behind the News (BTN) at school, and bring home their stories and questions about that. But ultimately, we’re all the victims of our own personal filter bubbles outside of that.
What do we do about it? Explicitly set aside time for news, information, etc? Take the time to discuss what they hear? I think some of the drive towards personalised consumption of the media we go to these days also tends to make them difficult to share - there’s no schedule, no assumption of “family viewing”, and everyone just drifts to their own personal queues.
On the other hand, is the homogenous media consumption also potentially problematic, reinforcing generational groupthink on contemporary issues? Previous gen kids get their homogenous cultural context from algorithmic filter bubbles instead of manually curated media network or parental filter bubbles. Is that worse?
Gratuitous mention of AI as more people trend towards just asking a chatbot for things, and the issue of bias and homogenous world views for their flavour of chatbot. Is this “media networks but bigger”, or something different? The media networks of old are controlled by rich white old money guys, the (western) AI companies are controlled by rich white tech bros. Is there much of a difference?
Even throwing open weight AI models into the mix, the training and motivation is opaque, and truly open source models are few and far between and far less funded.