I just watched the Ballad of Buster Scruggs on my online internet provider. Excitedly, I mention at lunch the last story of the movie. My friends all look puzzled: The Ballad of whom? Buster what? The makers of the Ballad are not particularly niche: The Coen Brothers have produced Fargo, the Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, and won dozens of awards, including four Oscars and a Palme d’Or in Cannes. They are, by all means, famous. When No Country for Old Men was released, in 2007, I remember going to the movies, with the same friends, and discussing it at length afterwards. I change the topic, and mention the recent strikes in France. Strikes, really? Weren’t the protests over? We finish sharing the meal, though again each of us had ordered a different dish, and there is not much to compare regarding the taste of the lasagna.  

Informational bubbles - where, as former President Obama said, we live and think “surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook” - are coming under heavy criticism. So am I not sounding retrograde to regret the time where I could mention a movie by the Coen Brothers, or recent news, and reliably assume some of the people around would know what I was talking about?

The bubble metaphor, like other catchphrases, might be misleading: sharing the same information with others does not necessarily make us float, isolated, in thin air. It enables us to feel grounded in a shared reality.

The bubble metaphor, like other catchphrases, might be misleading: sharing the same information with others does not necessarily make us float, isolated, in thin air. It enables us to feel grounded in a shared reality.

In an essay called ‘Rational Animals’, philosopher Donald Davidson highlighted that our knowledge of the objective world could not be an individual affair: it rests, he wrote, on a process of triangulation between our thoughts and the thoughts of others. Davidson was careful here not to say that reality was constructed by social interactions: his point was that social calibration of our responses was the way we would come to know that there was an objective world out there. Pointing and realising that we respond to something that must be common plays a crucial role in making us realise that there is a reality out there. A child comes to know what ‘green’ is because her own representation of green is informed by adults pointing at objects and uttering the word ‘green’. In the same way, we come to know that some object really exists because our own representations of that object converge with those of others. Here too, we need to realise that what we are attending to is one and the same object. As Davidson put it, others are not just a way of checking that something is real: they are part of the very idea that something can exist independently of us. Others are not what makes reality what it is (as the constructivists and proponents of alternative facts would argue) but they are also not just useful additions (as the individualist would say). Shared access is integral to our concept of an objective world.