The Death of Nuance
How selective media leads to dogmatic politics
by Z IVAN MILLER
My finger hovers over the “unfollow” button on the screen of my iPhone. Why am I following this person? It’s Stuart Stevens — former top strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential run in 2012. Oh, that’s right. I don’t remember the exact Tweet, but it was decisively anti-Democrat. I had followed him after a recommendation from the political podcast “Keepin’ It 1600,” hosted by a couple of former Obama staff members. Remembering the recommendation, I scrolled on. If people that ran directly against him can acknowledge him as a positive contributor, I figured I could too.
Maybe.
Customization is a key component in the beauty of social media. Every day, we get to choose what is seen based on our own personal filters. However, those filters can also isolate different ideas and people from interacting with each other, resulting in a timeline that simply reaffirms what is already believed.
“Consumers on both sides don’t like pundits whose views are all over the place,” writes Matt Taibbi in a column titled “College Kids Aren’t the Only Ones Demanding ‘Safe Space’” for Rolling Stone. “They want white hats and black hats, allies and enemies, even though in real life most people are not wholly one thing or another. And when one of the performers steps off-script, it’s a ‘problem.’”
The subtitle of the column: The much-ridiculed fear of ideas on campuses is just a parody of mainstream political discourse in America.
The internet has made picking and choosing information easier than ever before, but the idea of “echo chambers” is not new. Even in old sayings like “birds of a feather flock together” — the point is made that people will inevitably gather with other like-minded individuals. And the media has long used that to their advantage, tailoring their coverage to please readers or viewers instead of reporting what is verifiable, and therefore replacing facts with opinion. Differentiation of news media is not about the quality of the news, but instead how it’s even reported in the first place.
Pair that misinformation with an increasing uninformed voter base that, according to USA Today, decades of survey data shows have low levels of political knowledge. In the 2014 campaign, which decided control of Congress, only 38% of voters knew which party controlled the House of Representatives and which one controlled the Senate.
What’s left is an endless process of sifting through only the “information” we want to hear, perpetuating partisan and ideological divide with little room for discussion in 140-character or sound-bite sized hot takes.
So yes, buzzwords from this year’s campaign season like populism, trigger warnings, and safe spaces do matter and are a fundamental problem with the First Amendment. It’s not because it puts the freedom in danger of being taken away, it’s because it doesn’t operate correctly in the first place. Populism can’t work when the general population isn’t even aware of what the established status quo actually is. Trigger warnings and some safe spaces, though they may have good intentions, are just another way to filter out real life conflict and further insulate discussion from outside criticism.
Peter de Bolla, professor of cultural history and aesthetics at King’s College, Cambridge, told Elaine Moore of the FT Weekend that he worries about the reasons put forward by students who choose not to read texts. “It seems incredibly worrying,” he says. “If texts are not taught, you risk cultural amnesia. And if you are really interested in literature, you don’t want someone else to prejudge the content.”
The problem is often painted as generational — and then targeted towards one or the other. Younger generations on college campuses are quick to aim accusations of internet illiteracy and the failings of old media at older generations, and the older generation accuses the younger of diluting the discussion by being soft and inactive.
Often times, each are correct, and the source comes from the same place — devotion to ideological purity over pragmatic compromise.
The power of freedom of speech is reliant on how members of the public choose to use it. If that use exists only to voice opinions that are echoed back or scorned, with no middle ground, then speech loses its purpose as a tool of intellectualism and democracy. Words have less importance when nuance is dead.
“Put it all together, and it seems apparent that we’re all going to wind up sending out strings of moving images to get our thoughts across,” writes Kevin Maney in Newsweek. “But it seems unlikely that GIFs are going to help anyone understand the pros and cons of sending troops to fight the Islamic State militant group, or ISIS. GIFs are more likely to convey just the emotion of how good it would feel to smack down an asshole.”
Donald Trump is the inevitable result of a GIF-able voting population that consumes nothing but media designed to cater to the desire of viewers. When Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and other talking heads come along and specifically spout only conservative messages to a conservative audience, the result is a voting block that no longer understands objectivity. Now, Trump has gobbled up the those biased sound bites and regurgitated them with a mix of braggadocio and extremism that ignores all sense of rational discussion.
Democrats have been guilty of some of the same partisan purity. This past week, when Bernie Sanders called his opponent and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton unqualified, his list of reasons, by proxy, insinuated that only he was qualified. The things he believed disqualified her would disqualify the majority of Democrats, including sitting President Obama. It was just the latest evidence of ideological invasion in politics that results in dogma over working policy.
That political dogma has taken hold in the university system as well according to John Hasnas, professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and executive director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics, who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the aversion to conservative politics present in institutes of higher education: “I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints.”
He later writes, “Actually engaging with those with whom one disagrees can break down stereotypes and promote understanding across ideological divides. And if students see faculty members who share their unpopular viewpoints, they may be more inspired to pursue intellectual excellence.”
When people refuse to talk, critically analyze, and compromise, the result is a disservice to our first amendment rights. Disagreement does not have to be an innate threat, but ideology leaves little room for error and instead reinforces an anti-intellectualism that makes it more difficult to grow. 2016 might have the most polarizing election in American history, but maybe it’s what we deserve for throwing real conversation out the window.
I’m Z Ivan Miller — writer and soon to be graduate of Champlain College’s Professional Writing department. My work has appeared in Broken Records Magazine and Broken Records Online, Auditory Spectrum, and in publications associated with Champlain College.
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