The personal website of Matt Henderson.
11 October 2012
One of the most enriching things I’ve done in my life has been living abroad, experiencing cultures and societies completely different from those in which I was raised. That made me appreciative of things I formerly took for granted, and it exposed me to ways of thinking, living and doing things that otherwise may have never occurred to me.
As regular Twitter users, we’re exposed each day to the stream of tweets from those we’ve chosen to follow. That stream represents a slice of the social universe that’s unique to us. If we imagine each of those voices as a distinct ingredient, the resulting social dish that we consume on a daily basis is one-of-a-kind in the flavors of culture, interests, education and point of view.
It’s probably worth considering that that experience is less diverse and in certain ways potentially more influential that the real-world experience of the societies in which we live. So today I was imagining being able to “move” into the unique social experience of other Twitter users — i.e. being able to see the stream of tweets from another user’s followers — and wondering if it could be as enriching in the unexpected ways that moving abroad was for me.
Would I more likely understand how a person could form an opinion that now seems completely unreasonable to me? Would I come to understand how some of my own viewpoints are limited or distorted by my own unique social exposure, repeated day after day?
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