Do you live in a bubble?

We are all unique individuals with our own likes and dislikes of media, thus there may or may not be common experience to build a conversation on. We in the west live in a world where there is still wilderness, dangerous animals who look at humans as a flavorful meal. While an urban city dweller sees no need for personal protection. Is it any wonder we can't see eye to eye on the gun control issue? Decisions by people thousands of miles away effect our economy, way of life, etc. and you wonder why there is resentment.

Poker

I personally know people of lots of different political variations. Of those I interact with on a routine basis:

Dedicated Tea Party types
Devout Bernie Sanders supporters

Religious Right
Dedicated Atheists

True conservatives
Business conservatives

Working class Trump supporters

Solid liberals
Academic liberals

Greens
Anti-environmentalists

Etc

The group which I have personally observed (others who may have observed different groups based upon who they know - always a challenge with anecdotal information) that is the most in the bubble is

#1 Academic liberals - these guys are in their own ultraliberal echo chamber and are absolutely clueless about the outside world. To the extent that they pay attention it is to demand that the clueless peasants (aka the other 99.99% of us) do what they are told.

#2 Solid liberal - They have the entertainment media echoing their beliefs as well as most of the news media (except Fox and the Wall Street Journal which they can and do easily avoid). They are often self righteous in their beliefs and so hostile (aka calling people racists or other derogatory names) that the only idea exposure they get is from yes men.

#3 The small segment of the religious right which successfully has insulated itself from mainstream culture. (Most of the religious right is not in a bubble as much as they would like to be, popular culture just isn't that easy to avoid)

Oddly enough the Tea party types, the Bernie Sanders supporters, and the Trump supporters aren't in the bubble. They know the bubble exists (a key feature of being in the bubble is that most bubblites don't believe bubbles exist) and they want to smash it.

It's a poorly written quiz because it starts with the assumption that the only people inside bubbles are typical NPR totebaggers, and looks to find ways in which the quiz taker is not typical NPR. I got a very high nonbubble score, which I know is not true. It told me that I got this score because I worked my way out of poverty.

Which is total crap - I grew up wealthy, had a bout of poverty, and we're scraping our way back to middle class.

Any person who listens to only one type of news source, or has only one type of friends, lives in a news bubble. If you don't make the effort to go outside your comfort zone and listen respectfully to people with opposing views, you're blindfolding yourself to another side of the truth.

To be human is to be biased by your experiences. The wider your range of experience, the thinner your bubble. The NPR quiz grasps at this but fails in the end.

Someone who lived in a complete news blackout could take that quiz and end up with a feelgood score saying they're completely bubble-free, but in reality they got that score because they grew up poor and watch a lot of generic pap television and are completely uninformed of the nuances of current political controversies.