In today’s climate of justifiable suspicion about the Googles and Facebooks of the world, it’s easy to overlook the responsibilities of the individuals using these platforms. While I’m always happy to point out the problematic nature of the data harvesting and information dissemination that these companies are built upon, I would also suggest that this does nothing to diminish our own social and moral obligation to make significant efforts to inform ourselves, resist contributing to increase polarization and do whatever necessary to escape our cozy echo chambers and information bubbles.
Being a good citizen in a democracy requires more than many of us seem to think and much more than our actions often suggest. Pointing fingers, even when done in the right directions, is nowhere near enough. We need to wade through the oceans of bullshit emanating from partisan talking heads, fake news peddlers, marketing driven, agenda-suffused cable-news stations and algorithmically curated newsfeeds in order to determine which actions, policies, and candidates best represent our values, as well as the values most conducive to the health of a thriving democratic society.
President Obama, in a recent interview at the Obama Foundation Summit offered the following: “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.”
The point, I take it, is not to disregard the mistreatment of marginalized groups but to do something beyond mere posturing and attempting to appear ‘woke’.
Too many of us today seem to believe that it’s enough to call out the many who err or those we may simply disagree with. “Then I can sit and feel pretty good about myself”, said Obama, “because, ‘man, you see how woke I was? I called you out.’ That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do”.
And while I’m quick to agree that platforms like Twitter and Facebook lend themselves to this practice of racing to be the first to spot and out injustice or ignorant speech, we still need to recognize when we’re being lulled into an ineffectual gotcha game of virtue signaling that, though it may provide fleeting feelings of superiority, produces very little in the way of lasting change or dialogue.
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The speed with which Facebook and Google have come to play a central role in the everyday life of so many makes it easy to overlook how recent these companies are. Nonetheless their effects are undeniable. As we shared baby photos and searched for information on anything that might spark our curiosity, they’ve been aggregating our offerings and feeding us what they know will keep us coming back.
None of us like to be confronted with the possibility that we’re alone, that our beliefs might be false, or our deeply held values ultimately misguided. So social media curates our experience to provide us with the validation we so often seek. How better to do this than to gift us our own beliefs and values through the words and stories of others? This keeps us clicking and keeps the advertising dollars pouring in for the companies involved. Just like the angry incel savoring the hateful rantings of Donald Trump, we all feel the cozy pull of having our own views echoed back to us.
But, of course, none of this provides anything by way of truth or understanding. And more to the point at issue, none of this is conducive to an open-minded population willing to do the work required to breathe new life into an ailing democracy teetering on the precipice of unbridgeable polarization. While Aristotle, in the first democracy, aptly said (and I’m paraphrasing) it’s the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, social media has given us the means of reinforcing our own thoughts without subjecting them to the slightest scrutiny. In fact, one might find these two distinct ideas to be fitting bookends for the nearly 2500 year run of democracy.
While this characterization of things may be a bit hyperbolic, the existence of problematic echo chambers and curated tunnel vision is quite real. Fox News acolytes dig in their heels while liberals roll their eyes, and each side drifts further away from the possibility of honestly engaging with the views of the other. (*I refuse to equate the so-called ‘extremes’ on the left with those on the right. There’s a clear moral and epistemic difference between an oblivious (or worse) refusal to acknowledge, for example, the current resurgence of xenophobia and white supremacy and the desire for health care for all or basic income).
The online social media environment, with its intrusive notifications and conduciveness to mindless scrolling and clicking, falls short of providing an optimal arena for informed evaluation and close examination of information. It’s for this reason that I believe we need to slow our online experience. So many of us ‘grown-ups’ impose limits on our children’s technology usage but do so while staring into the void of facile stumpers and bottomless distraction. Maybe a simple break would do us well. Forget that. A break would do us well. Many of us need to take a goddamn walk…without the phones. Look someone in the eye. It might turn out that the ‘idiot Trump supporter’ or the ‘snowflake Socialist’ is just an ordinary, imperfect human like yourself (*hate-filled racist, nationalist misogynists to the side – there is nothing worthy of engaging in such cases).
Moreover, in these days where our every move is harvested and aggregated, and where massive data companies commodify our very lives, it’s crucial that we recognize all of this while avoiding a victim’s mentality. We have an obligation to inform ourselves, evaluate our beliefs, reevaluate when new information arrives, then incorporate or discard where appropriate.
Navigating the world of ideas and agendas has become far more difficult due to social media, the intentions of the all-pervasive corporate giants, the sheer quantity of information which leads to more skimming than careful consumption, the ever-lurking pull of fatigue-based complacency and politically-motivated fake news, amongst countless other factors. But, one way or another, we need to adapt if we’re going to have any hope of preserving democracy. Otherwise, we’re likely to revert to a power-dominated state-of-nature in which the only difference is the fact that this time around it was ushered in by technology.