Not to hate on Twitter and YouTube, but all sides of an issue can’t be encompassed in 140 characters or a three-minute video.

And because of the constant churning of a 24-hour TV news cycle, there’s no time to stop, think and consider all sides of an issue.

Doing that loses eyeballs, which loses advertising dollars, which loses revenue, which means a company can’t keep up with the competition. And sadly, the last bastion of sitting down and thinking, the newspaper, is fighting a losing battle against blogs and aggregators.

Information today is cut into digestible bits for a public that wants to be fed in the form of talking points, highlight reels and lists, and those individual bits of incomplete or shallow information allow the public to reaffirm its beliefs.

The New York Times recently published a story on researchers who are finding evidence that the evolution of rationality in humans was not in order for us to find the truth about something but to win more arguments with each other. When forced to make jumps in logic, we choose what we’re certain of as opposed to what might be the truth.

In the context of today’s society, this makes the compression of information even worse. Now, because so much information is available, anyone can find and interpret information as he or she sees fit, whether or not it’s true. If people aren’t using information to find the truth and instead are using it to reinforce preconceived notions, they move themselves further to the extremes of an issue.

This doesn’t make me excited for the future. Where does it all end?

Do the polarized desires of a public cause whiplashes in government with no plan being given more than a few years to work before being replaced?

Does the constant stream of information ingested only in 140 characters or three-minute videos shorten the attention span and critical thinking capability of an entire generation? I hope not. But the gulf is widening.

In the case of the NFL labor situation, fans have decided it’s either “the greedy owners decided the only way to keep lining their pockets with billions is to take a bigger slice of the revenue pie from the players,” or “the greedy players decided a long time ago to break the league and get more money out of the owners so they could buy two more Ferraris and another condo in South Beach.” These two points are argued exhaustively across the Internet.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Technological anonymity causes people to be bigger and badder in their arguments. Calling people footstools or mouthpieces or ignorant of the truth of your argument is much easier when you can’t see their faces. Threatening harm to them is much easier when you don’t know where they live.

But it should never get to that. In this case, fans shouldn’t be at each other’s throats because they want the same thing: football in the fall. The public has to acknowledge there’s more than one way to get to a solution.

If we used our growing access to information to seek out opinions that differ from our own, collective differences could be worked out. It’s difficult to wrap your head around a scenario that’s outside your comfort zone. And getting to a middle ground will take time and effort, but it’s worth it.

It’s worth it because, collectively, with a wealth of information to decompress at our fingertips, we can find a middle ground.

With the information that’s available to us, we can find the truth.

Lazarus Jackson is the State News opinion writer. Reach him at jacks920@msu.edu.