Poisonous Bubbles

I recently spotted a YouTube video playing that was outside my partner's customary watching parameters, and it occurred to me how easily media bubbles form, become entrenched, and what damage this does.  Legacy TV channels have a fixed schedule, so in the days before satellites and fibre optics, there were fewer channels to watch.  If you wanted to see the daily news, you had to be in front of the set at the right time. Twenty-four-hour news channels put an end to that. In the years since the Internet began to entertain and connect people, media consumers have more choices of viewing and listening options, but they tend to narrow their focus rather than broaden it.  In doing so, they cut themselves off from new ideas that don't fit the narrative of their usual input.  They may avoid information they don't agree with, but by avoiding everything outside their personal taste, they miss the sublime.  Rather than browsing the spectrum, they select the subjects with which they are comfortable and remain fixed in that narrow point of view.
   
Living in a bubble is like being locked indoors.  People adapted to such a state during the pandemic and discovered it was possible, and some never came out of it.  Bubbles, by their nature, are limiting.  Without exploring the wide world and all that it has to offer, fearful people often choose the easy options, ranging from A to B.  Bubbles can protect and insulate, but they are delicate, fleeting structures.  The realities of the physical world will eventually absorb the bubble, though some try to build walls around their bubble-worlds rather than accept their inevitable integration into life.

Bubbles form and coalesce into globular shapes because those shapes are at a lower energy state. Bubbles are spherical because that minimizes surface area due to the surface tension of the liquid film holding air inside. Bubbles are liquid membranes filled with gas, while a liquid globule surrounded by gas is a drop. A cell membrane is like a drop, a reverse bubble, that functions as a protective coating that surrounds a liquid, which is in turn surrounded by other cells.  In a living creature, the cells, like bubbles, are pulled into less than spherical shapes by the more robust organic structures they encounter.
 
There are bubbles in bread, cakes, cereals and chocolate, and liquids like beer, champagne, mineral water and soft drinks.  Bubbles and droplets are essential structures of living things, but wherever they appear, they are subject to alteration by the medium that envelops them.  Bubbles are not permanent, though evidence of their presence remains visible by the shape they have expanded into their matrix.  These are like the bodies in Pompeii, buried and burned by Vesuvius' ash, that have been revealed by plaster casts of the hollows left by the smothered human shapes.  Perhaps there is an ash or a jewel left in these cavities, but their organic contents have been consumed, leaving only the empty forms.  Bubbles are hollow and usually contain a gas that is close to the density of their encompassing medium, but they can also harbour harmful or poisonous gases.

Bubbles are impermanent, mobile, evolving structures that it is better not to get trapped inside. They are an unstable shield that can leave the hermit trapped like a fly in amber.  Maintaining a bubble's integrity against all onslaughts is a losing proposition.  Bubbles are elastic, and if pushed too far by outside forces, their membranes will rupture, and the bubble will pop.  It is not a permanent home to find refuge from the unpleasant things in the world. These problems need to be confronted and fixed, without averting our eyes and thinking we can float away unscathed on the next friendly breeze.