Burst Your Bubble

I like the Oxford dictionary definition: “burst your bubble” means “to shatter someone's illusions about something or destroy someone's sense of well-being.” Let us shatter illusions; if this disrupts well-being in the short-term, surely this leads to a more durable, more real sense of well-being. What good is well-being based on illusions? I don’t hate to burst your bubble. It’s my job. I gladly burst my own bubble. Sometimes I get frustrated, miss something, let my admittedly large and fragile ego get in the way. But changing your view based on new information is a skill that takes practice, and so is renewing well-being on the ruins of illusions.

There’s that well-known “no politics” rule of polite conversation. Lately it’s been weird to hear so many near-strangers and casual acquaintances launch into full-throated political tirades. Maybe we should be less afraid to talk about things that matter so much, but these were not invitations to conversation. They were more like a preacher sermonizing, waiting for someone to chime in with an “amen.” This is an observation, not a scientific finding; perhaps you have experienced the same, perhaps not, but it’s made me wonder if people are spending more time as living amplifiers of their favorite partisan “news” sources or reflections of social media memes and comment sections.

I wonder if growing virtual engagement plus real-life social isolation is creating more “hyperrealities,” as philosopher Jean Baudrillard would say: “The map precedes the territory.” In other words, the bubble is the point. As the hyperreal colonizes the world of flesh and blood, everything starts to look like a cheap theme-park simulation, a simulacrum; the same pressures that make pop music sound more and more the same turn politics into bad theater. Interaction does not aim for truth, or lies, but rallies those who live in the bubble and shames those who don’t. Everything comes to reflect an obsession with shallowness, with surface, disconnected from time or place. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, I had the same first reaction to Baudrillard, and I can only consider that this fits my observations and say “maybe.” Even that, it would seem, was his point: we live in “a desert of the real” where meaningful criticism has become impossible because no one and nothing “real” happens anymore.

I also think of sociologist Robert Putnam’s term “cyberbalkanization,” a fear he expressed more than two decades ago, that the Internet would cheapen relationships and social interactions, leading to mistrust, division, social isolation, and uncivil behavior; voicing opinions was becoming all-important; listening mattered little. We become increasingly willing to shut down, shout down, and shoot down both conflicting ideas and those who hold them. Opinions become a sacred part of us, and any criticism feels like a personal attack.

Have you ever seen someone say, “yeah, I guess you’re right; thanks for the information that broadened my view” in a comment section on social media? The solution will not, I think, take the shape of the problem. To burst my own bubble, maybe griping about social media by selectively using theory and sociology is just a shallow but smart-sounding way to flatter my own prejudices as I enter middle-age grumpiness. Maybe. But I’m willing to double down on grumpiness for a moment: if what I have observed is happening more broadly, then we are already too far gone for face-to-face communication to address the problem.

The answer is simple, if not easy. Reading. Reading beyond what confirms your biases and political leanings is a start. Reading right-wing news and left-wing news and middle-of-the-road news and mainstream news and fringe news. Some sources are, of course, more (or less) credible than others, but seeing why others hold the views they hold, and where those views come from, is inherently valuable, and is a first step in bubble-bursting. In a hyperreal world, how do you know where someone is coming from if you’ve never dipped a toe into their hyperreality? If “they” are “all liars,” then what “lies” are they telling, and what compels people to believe “them”? As I have said before, though it flatters our egos to believe we are right, and to mock those who disagree as crazy or stupid or evil, often we aren’t, and they’re not—others’ reasons for what they think and do are just as complex as ours.

To really burst bubbles means more deeply engaging with new and unfamiliar and uncomfortable ideas. It means tuning out a sound bite culture created and sustained by social media and television, at least sometimes. It means not reacting to headlines or making life-or-death decisions based on a single source. Most importantly, it means really reading actual books, fiction, nonfiction, scholarly writings, reading skeptically and slowly and thoughtfully. Reading to pour cold water all over half-baked opinions and recreational outrage. Reading to smash sacred illusions. Reading things that make, shape, and break worldviews, not partisan click bait or shallow social media noise, but works written by the best and the brightest “The Other Side” has to offer.

But I’m an academic, so I have all the time in the world to read, right? The life of an early-career tenure-track academic is not as different from your life as you might think. I work a full-time job teaching, writing, working on research, and serving my department, university, and community every week before I ever read a word. I also have a family and friends and hobbies. An age of libraries and the Internet makes reading essentially free, so if you’re reading this, it isn’t about “the money.” To burst bubbles, we must make time to read. Free time is precious. I challenge you to spend more of it reading books and articles written by smart people with whom you know you will disagree, who will challenge you, who will burst you bubble. The world is full of information. Start somewhere.

If you’re so inclined, what’s a book you’ve read that burst your bubble?

Sources:

Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacra and Simulation. Originally published in French by Editions Galilee.

Putnam, Robert D. 2020. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Szrot, Lukas. 2021. “Why Sociology?” Blog Entry, reprinted from 2020 American Sociological Association Teaching and Learning Roundtable. (https://lukasszrot.com/blog/why-sociology)

Image Source and Link to Creative Commons Licensing Information: (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Giant.bubble.jpg)