We belong to a world increasingly shrinking as our interconnectedness is growing. With social media and global newscasting, the world has started to resemble an epic eurasia, where people and communities can connect beyond the borders of land and sea. The access to this global platform acts as a bridge between communities, and thus, business, community and ideas have been able to stretch far beyond the lands that they originate from. But what about those countries that are not privy to the first nation platform accessible to developed countries that own global markets?
According to a publication by the Washington Post back in 2014, over 4.4 billion people still do not have any access to the internet. This means that, according to the virtual interface, they do not exist to us, and thus, do not matter, as they are not matter as far as we are concerned. Although our community is growing vastly and diversely, there is still an acute misunderstanding of those that we cannot interpret. Therefore, countries that are still developing are seen as the unknown, and thus, they are misunderstood as a group of people beyond our regular existence. They are differentiated and set as creatures unlike the rest of us. Cultures that hold separate ideas to our own are immediately targeted as members outside of our accepted community. In simpler terms, we as a people exist in the bubble of an ‘us’. Anyone outside of this club is classified as ‘them’, or those not belonging to us, because they belong to different cultures, norms and values.
As per our nature, the classification of individuals helps information management and basic understanding. It is easier to label a group of people within the two brackets of similar and different. Individuals that are different are seen as outsiders. This mentality is often seen in news broadcasting, whereby one story will be highlighted over another due to the unintentional bias of this selective importance. For example, on an international news report, a murder that has occurred in a more developed country will acclaim more news coverage than a mass murder in a developing country. If it is reported that there was a genocide in a developing country, it is not viewed as something that is entirely as tragic, as these kinds of terrible misfortunes are seen as commonplace in this area. However, due to that lack of importance and coverage, the tragedies continue to occur without the attention that they deserve. It is a cycle of misfortune that continues due to a lack of understanding from the other side of the world, the other side being us.
Think back on the news headlines over the past week, do you find any examples of this frame? If not, here is an example from this past Sunday, where newspapers highlighted the story of the ex-Met Lennie Dykstra and the team’s drug-related scandals, which was the cover of this Sunday’s post. However, in international news, ISIS recently shared a video showing the killings of five Syrian Media activists that were captured by the radical group, which is huge! This was not covered by the New York Post, although they included a piece which concentrated on the American and British murders that have occurred as a result of this ruthless terrorist group. So many will never know of these five murders that occurred in Syria, simply due to the fact that it is beyond the realm of one's own community, and thus is not as significant, or so it is perceived. Unfortunately, it is impossible to remove bias from the media. However, looking at this, and how our world has begun to separate between the East and the West, perhaps it is time to start rethinking our own mindsets in order to reflect on how it may be affecting our world.
By deciding to change the way we think about the ‘them’ that live beyond the borders of our television screens, we can soon find unity in our humanity, and thus work towards a better future. In the end, we all belong to a single 'one', that one being the humanity that exists within us all, beyond the culture and race that sets us apart. So lets work towards removing the 'them' from this equation. This is us, and this is our world to share.
