Social Media creates polarity

Facebook is about to release an app called Paper that ties a user's feed with actual news articles (see this article). This app will kick a few more fence-sitters off the fence. If a person does not have a strong opinion on a subject, with this app he or she will be exposed to articles that espouse the opinions of their friends. Thus, Paper will tend to polarize opinions on many issues. Whether or not people are kicked off the fence prematurely, or in the right direction is a different question. If people tend to drift towards the opinions of their friends, they may hold ideals they don't fully believe in.

Does society have too much information?

So much information is free and immediately accessible through the internet that people of today place little value on such information. Consider the research paper in junior high or high school. When a teacher places stricter requirements on the types of sources that can be used in writing the paper, how many students groan? What, no Wikipedia? Looking more closely at this response, isn't it a very backward attitude? Shouldn't we want the best available sources? The reality is that we don't value information; what we value is how easily we can get it. Since that has become our standard, the best available sources are no longer sought after. We need to recognize our own attitude towards the information that is available to us and place value on it based on credibility, not accessibility.