A white cop kills an unarmed black teenager in Anytown, USA, and a storm will brew.

The most recent of these storms is occurring in Ferguson, Mo. and it is a particularly vile one. Thoughts of Ferguson hang thick in the air, stinging the senses with the sharp pain that comes with controversy. We are pelted with angry quotes and assaulted by newly discovered evidence.  The amount of information is almost unrecordable.

With Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and millions of cellphones it has become easier than ever to share and access a seemingly never-ending supply of information and opinions.

But what are the consequences of this information overload?

With such an enormous amount of material, it has become easier than ever to pick and choose the information you wish to obtain.

You are deciding what information you do and do not receive. Whether it’s the news site you read, the radio station you listen to in the car, the people you follow on Twitter and Tumblr, or the pages you ‘like’ on Facebook, you don’t have to see, hear, or think about anything you don’t want to. Essentially, you can compartmentalize your media sources so that you never have to view anything that opposes your beliefs – and information ignorance is born.

Ferguson is a prime example of this, as with such an onslaught of information nobody seems to know (or want to know) the full story. You can choose to either hear the story of the tear-gas victims using milk to soothe their burns or the story of looters breaking into a McDonalds and stealing milk bottles. You can choose to see the autopsy, or simply ignore it. You can read about Mike Brown being a ‘thug’ or Darren Wilson being a murderer. Both sides of the debate are choosing to ignore bits and pieces of the story. Both groups disregarding sets of information has led to this ongoing event becoming even more hostile and violent.

This picking and choosing of information, in short, allows each of us to define our own world – a world that conforms to our individual belief system and looks the way we will it to.

We form a world where we can shout out everything we believe and hear it reverberate back (just from a different source).

This information ignorance exacerbates the “us versus them” scenario, as it minimizes the “us.”  When the “us” in “us versus them” becomes smaller, it becomes more difficult to understand how other viewpoints ever came to be. We begin to wonder how someone could ever possibly think differently than us. We spend so much time listening to ourselves, or mirrors of ourselves in the media, that there is no longer time left to listen to the arguments of the “them.”

As soon as we reach an opinion, the research stops and the reinforcement of our opinion is found in those who agree.

If we all continue to create our own worlds in which to live in, and continue to become so individualized that we no longer acknowledge anything that contradicts our ideas, the same controversies and problems occurring today will arise again and again.

In the end, we must break out of our routine of information ignorance and attempt to broaden our horizons. In doing this, we can move one step closer to removing another “Ferguson” from the timeline.