'Who are we voting for?' my son asked me in the days leading up to the election.
I smiled; he'd asked the same question when he voted for the first time a few years earlier, in a state election. But if I hadn't known him any better — he has a reasonable grasp of current affairs and has wondered aloud about whether to vote for fringe groups like the Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) Party — I might have frowned instead, for it's too easy these days to influence another person's political, religious and social choices.
There's good reason for this: though the internet has stretched and expanded the number of people and places we have access to, it has also constrained the range of ideas and opinions to which we're exposed. Research findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year found that Facebook users tend to read and share information that reinforces their own beliefs.
The result is the formation of so-called 'echo chambers', in which groups of people in possession of homogenous ideas exist in isolation to those who think differently from them.
It's not new, this tendency to congregate with like-minded people. But the online landscape — the sheer magnitude of content, the social isolation often experienced by people living vicariously through their computers, the aggressiveness with which ideologies are being marketed — makes us more susceptible than ever to the sometimes narrow set of beliefs espoused by the people we interact with.
This phenomenon is not entirely the fault of the algorithms used by social media sites to ensure users receive content (including adverts) curated to their perceived interests; also to blame is the erosion of good, factual journalism, which in the past delivered trustworthy information upon which people could build their own educated opinions.
As The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katherine Viner, noted in her feature on technology's disruption of the truth, some journalists no longer feel it necessary to check their sources in order to report their claims as fact. Moreover, newsprint is being increasingly taken over by comment and opinion.
Couple this with Facebook's role as the world's leading social media source of news — and the increasing tendency among our politicians to use fear as a method of governance — and the echo chamber shrinks and becomes more deafening still.
"One acquaintance announced during the election campaign that he'd summarily unfriended someone who'd posted 'one too