I’m a music lover.

As a young kid of 9 or 10, I remember having a Walkman and listening to cassettes on long car journeys. It was mostly stuff my parents had introduced me to at the time, so things like Phil Collins, Elton John and Crowded House come to mind.

As a teenager this love of music increased and so did my purchasing. I had a job from age 15 onwards and a large chunk of the money I’d earn got spent on CDs. Radiohead, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Rage Against The Machine got the most rotation at that stage of my life.

During my later teen years, I also got heavily into electronic music. Northern Exposure was my gateway drug into this scene and some 20 years later, it still gets listened to regularly.

I even worked at Resident Advisor for a number of years (it’s like the Wikipedia of electronic music but with writing of the quality you’d find in The New Yorker).

These days, Spotify is my go to source for music. It’s what I listen to everyday while working.

Spotify has a playlist called Discover Weekly. Each week it creates a new playlist of roughly 2.5 hours of music and this is specific to me. It looks at what I’ve been listening to and recommends the music it thinks I will like based on this.

I always loved Discover Weekly. Every Monday I’d get this new collection of music to listen to. Over the next week I’d listen to it every day, sometimes just on repeat.

And it was great, because it would be this real eclectic mix. I’d get bands I’d never heard of, some classical music, bits of electronic music and then stuff I’d struggle to classify. I wouldn’t like all of it and some tracks I’d skip over, but I loved the variety and it was ever broadening my music listening.

But something changed.

Some time in early January I was listening to a lot of electronic music. I was finding old tracks from years ago, going through producer’s whole catalogues or a label’s whole catalogue and generally just doing a deep dive into all things electronic.

Unfortunately this narrow focus of listening started to skew my Discover Weekly recommendations. No longer did I get the variety I had been; now I was getting recommendations basically around one genre of music.

Around this same, I finally got around to watching Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalisation. It was released last year in the October time and had been on my “must watch” list since I first heard of it.

The documentary looks at world affairs since the 1970s. It focuses heavily on the issues in the Middle East and the rise of suicide bombers. It discusses the Cold War and Russia’s shift from then until now. It looks at the financial industry and the changes it has seen over this time.

It is by no means a light documentary and uses a montage of clips with Curtis narrating over the top.

One of the main points of the film is that we now live in “fake worlds”.

As more of our news and information is delivered in electronic form, what is served up to you is what this technology thinks we are going to like. It decides what it thinks is appropriate based on the people in your electronic circle of friends, your age, your gender, where you live, etc.

So if you were to search for something on Google and I was also to search for that same thing on Google, we’d get different results depending on what the algorithm believes is most relevant to us.

The problem with all of this is it keeps up living in a bubble. You end up in echo chambers where all you see are things that meet up with your opinions.

Or if you are shown something you disagree with, it’s because the whole point is for you to be outraged by the news. And every one in your social group is also suitably outraged. You just look at the comments on Facebook and everyone agrees with your beliefs.

This is dangerous. We shouldn’t live our lives in bubbles, reading and listening and watching things that never challenge our beliefs. Otherwise it’s too easy to slip into an “us versus them” mentality, where the opposition is a caricature instead of a living and breathing individual.

When I look back on my journey as a nutritionist, I can see how much my opinions and beliefs have changed. And this continues to happen even now.

But the reason this happens is because I’m open and prepared to delve into ideas that go against my current beliefs. I find sources whom I know are great researchers, but they share a different view. And so I explore their research and what they are saying and see how well my ideas stand up. Often, they start to change.

I love the technological world we live in, with information just a keystroke away. But please see the faults with this system and the insulating nature of it. The more you can break out and explore ideas that challenge your own, the better.

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