Do you feel a conflict between the familiar experiences of many and the foreign of your own. Do you want more foreign of the familiar?

Question

D you feel more alone with your experiences if you do not see them represented in media coverage?

Answer 1

Humans are creatures of habit. The philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the most dominant forms of ideology (social control) are those that become so familiar we no longer see them. Prison guards only need to work two per entire cell block, since the walls inside the prisoners' heads keep them secure just as must as the physical ones. Consequently, to make the familiar strange takes effort. Theater director Bertolt Brecht had a long word for this process: Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect."). When a woman in a bikini carries a number on a sign around a boxing ring between rounds, you're supposed to think, "oh yeah, this is a boxing match." Brecht used similar tactics, like an actor looking at the audience and yelling, "THIS IS A PLAY! WE'RE STARTING NOW!!!" Brecht wanted audiences to "wake up" in general from their blindness to ideology.

The question you're asking is tough since it requires an almost-Buddhist waking up from what we each take for granted about how the world works.

In particular, to feel "a conflict between the familiar experiences of many and the foreign of your own" requires two components. On the one hand, you have to come into contact with the ways of "others" in the first place, an increasingly difficult task given the tribalization of social technology. Most people inhabit information ecosystems that encourage "conformation bias": seeing in the world those things you expect to find. Social media algorithms operate by clumping people into groups of based on similarity. Citizens no longer inhabit shared spaces, so the encounter with others who hold differing beliefs/customs/habits becomes less common.

Second, to compare/contrast the familiar with others with the foreign of self takes empathy, which is another way of saying you have to recognize the shared humanity across groups. Often, the imaginary "them" does the work of helping define "us." To critique the "familiar experiences of many and the foreign of your own" doesn't work if you can't see others as people, which unfortunately typifies our current political climate.

We have to make a concerted effort to have empathy.

It's hard. But worth it.