The Degradation of Public Discourse
“How dare you?” asked Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swede when she, almost singlehandedly, relaunched the conversation about our planet’s health. One day, she might receive proper recognition from “official” forums and gain her place in history as an important activist, but in today’s online climate (no pun intended), she’s just fodder for memes and ridicule. A cynic’s dream — an actual earnest person.
The Globalization of Cynicism
The first pillar of the problem I’m outlining is the frankly disturbing level of cynicism in today’s discourse.
In the past, Greta may have been mentioned in a newspaper, have had a small slot on a local TV station, and would’ve been forgotten. But local has no meaning online. Any piece of online content is no longer even national; it’s world news — at least potentially. And the world is a big place, with an unending supply of feel-good stories and horrible disasters.
There’s an argument to be made that cynicism — or event nihilism — is actually a rational reaction to the endless bombardment of awful news. Can we be expected to retain a positive attitude towards the human race after seeing time and time again the very worst that it has to offer?
And so, a race to the cynical bottom begins. At first, it’s a defense mechanism against the deluge of horror online that’s suffocating us. Then, it actually becomes the way we see the world. And having spent a long time in those black-colored glasses; having been vindicated so many times, after putting our faith in someone or something and seeing it turn to rust; having witnessed thousands of times more of anything from the comfort of our sofa than anyone could a century ago, we break. Our faith in humanity shatters, and we become yet another online cynic. And any attempts we might make at earnestness are either met with cynicism from others, or are indeed cynical themselves.
How public is too public?
But perhaps I’m overreacting? Perhaps the reaction to Ms. Thunberg’s actions is reasonable — healthy, even. After all, she did hold press conferences, take a public stance on a sensitive issue, and in effect declare herself a public figure. Doesn’t it make sense for her to receive a certain amount of pushback from said public? This line of thinking makes some superficial sense, but a historical perspective should illustrate how unique and unhealthy the online culture is today.
I want to make clear that the definition of a “public” figure has grown to absurd proportions. In one sense, anyone who puts out anything online is going public.
A girl with an Instagram account is a public figure — anyone can see her selfies, like them, comment on them, take a screenshot and keep them, create a meme out of them, and otherwise distribute them (making them even more “public”). A guy’s Twitter account is a permanent record of everything he ever deemed twit-worthy — which, based on today’s norms of online etiquette, is probably a lot.
Versions of ourselves we aren’t even aware of are cluttering the web, to stay there in perpetuity. Today, we are defined by whatever Google has to say about us — whether or not we still believe it.
Views, they are a-changing
My views on pretty much any subject of import have changed dramatically in the last 10 years, and I take some pride in that. I believe that it’s healthy to evolve your thought. So, when I quit Facebook, I deleted every post I ever wrote there. I didn’t want my 20-year old self’s thoughts to become the first (or even the 100th) thing anyone who looked me up online would see. But someone could’ve taken a screenshot; Facebook may have kept a copy of the posts, without really deleting them; a search engine could’ve scraped the data and made it available again. There’s no way to know, and that’s exactly my point.
There are probably dumb opinions I’ve once held, or random musings taken out of context, lying around on the Internet, waiting to be found. Thankfully — and this is just it, isn’t it? — I’ve yet to do anything to turn the Internet’s eye of Sauron towards myself. But, as should be evident to anyone who’s ever visited reddit, 9gag, or indeed YouTube, it doesn’t take much to become “Internet famous.”
The Price of Fame
“But what’s wrong with fame?” some of you might say (and if you do, I envy your naiveté). Fame was always desired by some, maybe even most. But the fame that people had in mind was based on merit and deserts. It wasn’t being famous for having taken an unflattering photograph in a dorky sweater, forever becoming a meme. We wanted to be famous for our best sides, not our worst.
There were of course some, in the past, who may have wanted to be famous regardless of their worth. But it wasn’t until the advent of reality TV that the concept of being famous for nothing at all, except the cyclical fact of being famous, became a prevalent part of our culture. Yellow journalists (and eventually mainstream media), used to covering Hollywood starlets and royal families (who, in fairness, probably didn’t deserve the attention given to them), couldn’t adapt fast enough to the expanding definition of “fame,” and have exacerbated the problem.
Just like citing a Wikipedia article that links to the very blog post it’s referring to, the attention lavished on reality TV “stars” gave their fame a semblance of credibility. And now, we’re all reality stars of our own online performances. And everyone else is the prying paparazzi, who doesn’t even need to leave the comfort of their couch to get a close look at the inside of our bathroom, because we’ve already posted a hundred selfies in the mirror of that very water closet.
All this — the ever-expanding definition of the public figure, the notion that anyone who’s perceived as such is “fair game,” and the cynicism directed at them — results in a perfect storm of vitriol that’s raging on the Internet. Many talk about the levels of outrage online. And they’re right. But I believe that cynicism, sarcasm, and ridicule are the worse issues. Just like the hipster’s weapon was his preemptive strike against ridicule — caring about nothing prevented him from being hurt by anything — so is the online cynic’s utter inability to allow herself to seem to care. So we mock, raising the bar of online scrutiny so high that one truly needs to have deep narcissistic tendencies to consider stepping into the public’s eye. Which, of course, fulfills the prophecy, and the cynic is justified — after all, he always said that all the politicians are liars.
