Editor's Note: Clearing the Fog

We live in a culture full of technology that claims to unmask, disambiguate and demystify the obscure. We have Netflix to give us access to movies that would have otherwise been hidden to us and social media to connect us with people to whom we would never have otherwise had the chance to speak. We in the developed world have access to education, information and entertainment in unprecedented volumes.

We are pretty bad at taking advantage of the wealth of resources available to us. We take for granted the ability we have to see, essentially, whatever we want to. It’s so easy to spend all our free time looking at videos of cats trying to sit in boxes that are too small for them and reading articles that endlessly confirm viewpoints we already have. This does nothing to unveil solutions to problems we face, as students, as a community, as a world.

I think it’s important that instead of remaining complacent, instead of being content to sit in the foggy swamp of information that is the internet, we try to clear some of that fog away so that we can see a little more of what’s really around us. It doesn't have to be a huge archaeological dig, either; it could just mean reading a well-argued viewpoint that differs from one we already hold, doing some research on world conflicts or social issues that we've heard of but don't know much about or trying to understand what life is like for those whose backgrounds are different from ours.

If we start doing these things even once or twice a day, I think we would start seeing the world we live in with a little bit more clarity.