Politics, murdered by the Internet
I couldn’t help myself. As many did, I watched with profound sadness the tragic events in San Bernardino last week, that sadness turning to fury when I thought about the inevitable lack of action by our leadership to combat events like these. Out of a sense of helplessness, I felt I needed to act in some way myself… to do something I thought could help push things forward. So when I saw posts like this one from a high school friend back in my hometown:
I attacked the keyboard with a righteous indignation.
I know, it was a bad idea. After a few hours of back-and-forth and a few dozen links to hastily-googled articles to back up my arguments, I thought I would have made a little bit of a difference. I thought that I would feel I would have somehow fought for what’s right, that I would be doing my part.
I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.
What I forgot is that on the internet, there is no such thing as winning. Both sides bounce from one logical fallacy to the next until someone calls the other person an idiot, quits and goes to bed. I know what you’re thinking: you could have told me that. But there’s a real problem here.
For baby pictures, football trash talk and birthday wishes, social media is a great forum. But the problem is that we’ve also used it as a forum for weighing in on meaningful debates. To do that, we subject those issues to the rules of the environment: it has to be snackable, light and inherently sharable. That’s not where those deep, complicated debates belong, but we put them there anyway. Every politician encourages engagement on those platforms, and it’s now a key part of most election campaigns. In a world where BuzzFeed is moving into “real” politics, we’ve moved politics towards BuzzFeed.
That’s why we have increasingly incendiary remarks driving the conversation, and important issues are reduced to bite-sized memes. That’s human nature: it’s just easier. It’s just easier to click “share” on a dramatically oversimplified, moderately funny post than to engage in rigorous debate. Those that already agree with you will revel with you in your wittiness. Those that disagree will quickly be ostracized. And we’ll all watch as that entire scene becomes much more than a metaphor.
As more of our communication moves online, the problem becomes bigger than just “that thing that happens on the internet.” It becomes real life. Slowly, we become accustomed to the positive reinforcement that comes from those that cheer us on, we ignore anything we can’t consume in 30 seconds or less, and we don’t commit the time to understanding those with different views. The Yale Halloween debacle demonstrated that even at universities, heralded as a bastion of intellectual rigor and open debate, students have adopted an intolerance for informed disagreement.
Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Connected? Yes. Open? Absolutely not.
We need a forum, a place where intellectual honesty is enforced, a place where discussions are genuinely motivated by a search for the right answer. We need a place where meaningful conversation can happen without descending into a flame war. While we have online forums for almost everything else, that doesn’t exist.
I really don’t know how that happens, because even if that place existed I’m not sure we’d use it. It’s really hard to overcome the basic human instinct for validation, the kind of validation that comes so easily from getting likes, faves and shares from people that already agree with you. There is so much potential, so much good that can be created by people finding their communities online. That’s happening. But what’s not happening is a meaningful dialog across differences. It makes me sad to see the national conversation reduced to snackable memes and incendiary vitriol, while meaningful, constructive debate finds no home. If we’re going to make progress, real progress toward solving complex problems, we have to recognize how counterproductive our latest methods of communication have become.
So resist that share button, resist the urge to channel your views into three-sentence comments, pretend like it’s 1995 and have an honest-to-God, face-to-face conversation with someone who disagrees with you.
