The Split Screen Society

It's becoming harder to tell whether we live in a shared reality or several overlapping simulations. Two people can watch the same event and emerge with opposite certainties — not because one is lying, but because they're tuned to different frequencies of "truth".

On one side are those who still trust legacy media — the polished anchors, familiar bylines, institutions that once defined credibility. On the other, those who've grown weary of editorial gatekeeping and now turn to alternative media, podcasts, and social feeds that promise rawer honesty and amplify voices the mainstream ignores.

Both groups believe they're informed. Both are seeing only part of the picture.

Legacy media filters reality through institutional caution and the blind spots of establishment consensus. Alternative media filters it through emotion, outrage, and algorithms optimised for engagement over accuracy. Neither tells you it's offering a partial view. Both feel complete from the inside.

Disagreement isn't the problem — it’s essential.

It’s how democracies stay honest and continuously evolve for the better. What's eroding is our willingness to acknowledge the gap — to admit that our information streams might be shaping us more than informing us. Our media choices have become tribal markers. Intelligent, well-meaning people now avoid each other's sources entirely, each convinced the other has been captured by propaganda.

And while we argue about whose reality is real, the consequences multiply. Political failures hide in the fog. Ideological capture goes unchallenged. Urgent collective problems — corruption, institutional rot, civic infrastructure decay — remain unsolved because we can't even agree on what's happening, let alone what to do about it.

We've built parallel realities, each self-reinforcing, each certain of its virtue. When truth becomes a matter of subscription preference, the public square doesn't just fracture — it disappears.

So what do we need?

Not better algorithms. Not louder fact-checking. Those might help at the margins, but they won't bridge the gap, because the gap isn't primarily technological — it's human.

We also don’t need more familiar faces with polished messaging and a smile that seduces.

What might actually work: spaces designed explicitly to cross divides and build a bridge over the gap.

Imagine if we brought people who rely on different information ecosystems into the same room to deliberate on real problems. Or if we had media projects where journalists from opposing ‘sides’ collaborate on investigations. Or if we could participate in community dialogues structured not for debate but for mutual understanding — where the goal is to map the gap, not win the argument.

These already exist in pockets. But they're rare, underfunded, and drowned out by systems engineered to do the opposite.

We can also meet this challenge individually. Every time we prioritise curiosity over combat, or opt for trust-building rather than convincing 'the other', we're doing the work.

Start small: trade one inflammatory headline for a genuine question. Invite someone who sees the world differently into conversation — not to convert them, but to understand what they're seeing that you're not. Read one source a week from outside your usual information ecosystem, not to agree with it, but to pressure-test your assumptions.

We don't need to find a false balance or meet in some mushy middle. We need to rebuild the capacity to inhabit disagreement without retreating into separate realities.

The truth is, every group that has ever convinced itself it had a monopoly on truth eventually discovered it didn't. The pattern is older than democracy itself. What's new is the speed and scale at which we can now construct these bubbles, and the precision with which they can be maintained.

The health of democracy isn't measured by whether we agree. It's measured by whether we can still see each other clearly enough to disagree productively — to argue about solutions rather than facts, to debate values rather than deny each other's reality.

Right now, we're failing that test.

But the gap isn't unbridgeable. It's just expensive — in discomfort, in humility, in the effort required to genuinely listen to someone whose certainties threaten our own.

The question is whether we're willing to pay the price.