Right Complex
On a scale of 0 to asshole, how much do you rate your ability to accept that you are wrong. If not wrong, mistaken. If not mistaken, hmmmful. Whatever your score is, it’s high time we accepted the changing realities of our era. Earlier, before the advent of social media, it was relatively more difficult to engage in a public debate. What the rise of the Internet facilitated — among other things — is the scope for conversations with absolute strangers. Moreover, you don’t need credentials to engage in a discussion anymore. You can be anybody in any part of the world as long as you have fingertips to literally gatecrash an outrage and scream your heart out with the caps lock button. Going by sheer arithmetic of web accessibility, more people also equals to more disagreements. But that doesn’t mean that the quality of conversation is improving. On the contrary, the more you go through threads — be it on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter — the more you are convinced that the exact opposite of improvement is in order. The free flowing abuses and the utter lack of logic in arguments are just two of the myriad problems facing the online face of humanity.
So, what exactly is going on?
I believe too much rightness is the key issue. Nope, not self-righteousness. When you’re self-righteous, you tend to have delusions about you being right and others being wrong. This isn’t the case at online side of the universe. On the Internet, you assume that you’re not only right but also that the other person can never be right. He’s perpetually wrong; he’s condemned to be so by guess who? You. Such attitude closes the door on enlightenment whatsoever. And thus the quality of conversation hits rock bottom. This behavioral trend is not very different from a mob on their way to attack their victims/perpetrators. Every single person in the mob tends to think that he is doing the right thing and the person he’s going to attack is never going to amend his ways. No matter what happens. Be it online or offline, one can easily quantify the depth of filth with such rigid mentality. Pity that so is the scenario half a millennia after the Renaissance! But then, as sociopolitical animals, we have a long way to go before we can claim that we are supposed to be humans with the capacity to hear each other out.
