SOCIAL MEDIA IS EVIL AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT
or How To Use Your Phone To Vaccinate Against Hate
We are living in spectacularly shit times.
Senseless violence.
Prejudice based on invisible deities who may or may not exist and may or may not be the exact same ones as our own anyway.
Murder allowed by “divine right” worldwide.
Dangerously moronic Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism and bigotry.
Futile terrorism.
It’s all spectacularly shit.
I have some good news and I have some bad news.
I’ll start with the bad news…
You can’t fix it with a tweet, Facebook post, or bangin’ IG Story.
Here’s the good news…
You can’t fix it with a tweet, Facebook post, or bangin’ IG Story.
Social Media isn’t built for these types of discussions.
Sure, occasionally, it will and can work.
Things will be hashed out peacefully, thoughtfully and with respect.
However, that is not the current usual path.
Plus @JohnnyBunchANumbers doesn’t actually have much pull legally, nationally or otherwise.
I remember reading in a book about music recording as it relates to the music business that most listeners hear only 65% or less of what is in the mix of a song.
That means most people upon passive listening don’t… hear the second harmony, that other guitar part, the shaker, the hi-hat, whatever.
They take the top 65% or less of what they can hear and form their opinion on that.
In Social Media I would guess that people are consciously consuming only the top 10% or less of any post.
And it’s not their fault.
Social Media is fleeting.
It’s FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) packaged and sold to us in bulk.
THERE IS SOMETHING BETTER ON THE NEXT SCROLL. I CAN FEEL IT.
This is not to condemn social media.
No, social media is EXACTLY what we wanted, want and will want.
If we change what we want, Social Media will change too.
Social Media is not news.
Social Media is headlines.
You need to dig for yourself to reveal context and comparison.
Whatever Social Media is giving you is exactly what you told it you want.
By watching or hate-watching.
By engaging or enraging.
Social Media is like (standby for some aged reference points)…
the masthead of the newspaper or that bottom text crawl on 24 news channels.
It tells you there’s a story but rarely tells you the whole story.
Without the whole story our chances of reacting incorrectly/inappropriately/unnecessarily are massive.
Social Media sparks dialogue between those of us who do not have the power to ultimately change things as individuals.
Social Media is largely how individuals feel about things.
Informed or uninformed.
Social Media posts by randos are not official stances or even necessarily representative of official stances.
So, how can we fix things?
Mark Twain famously said that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…”.
Social Media is the digital version of that travel.
Social Media can be an inoculation to help when “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime,” as Twain said.
Let me be clear…
Social Media is wonderful.
We can connect instantaneously with humans around the globe who live lives that are completely foreign to us.
We can learn.
We can listen.
We can empathize.
We can help.
We can create shared experiences that bring us together.
We can look in each other’s eyes and see ourselves.
We can use it to build peace.
All from the comfort of wherever we happen to be.
Let’s do that.
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The best advice I've read is that you don't have to show up for every fight you're invited to. Every bit of engagement adds up and social media ends up rewarding the most toxic content by making sure it is seen more. The more people click and respond, the more algorithms go "Hey! Everyone should see this!".
We need to stop paying attention to the mouth breathers who dribble nonsense. It *is* our collective fault when we give them an audience because we're ensuring that social media pushes it even deeper and to more people
Don't engage. It's a hard thing to keep in mind. As much as you want to tell someone that they're an idiot, resist the urge. Everyone knows they're an idiot. By pointing it out, we are just making sure that more idiots are given a platform.
The more I try to get to the bottom of an issue,the more confused I become. I no longer know how to assess my sources. There is so much deliberate lying and manipulation being put out over social media and the internet in general that I have no idea whether I am dealing with fact,fiction,misunderstanding, incomplete truth,deliberate lying or propaganda. I tend to have more faith in print media but that too may be very biased . Ah the days when you knew the Globe and Mail was on the opposite side of the fence as the Star!