America, Social Media and Our Race to the Bottom
When America stops thinking and reacts - bad things happen.
Pixabay image by geralt
I’ve been writing on Newsbreak for over a year and while many of my articles there are about politics, it’s not my only focus. If you spend enough years on this planet observing people and seeing how they interact, interesting things begin to reveal themselves. I like writing about these things with a little humor, a little compassion, and a genuine desire to see things improve. I will be adding NB articles to this newsletter from time to time. I hope you enjoy them. As always, let me know what you think.
We all react. Sometimes we regret it, sometimes we don’t, but we all do it.
Someone hits the horn on the freeway just before cutting you off. Up comes the middle digit.
Someone appears to be cutting in line at Starbucks. “Hey, hey, you can’t do that.” It’s just the husband giving his order to his wife.
We think we’re thinking when we react, but that’s not how it works. Reaction is involuntary. Something is said or done and a thought enters our head or a word leaves our mouth. It’s done before we know it.
In today’s world, thanks to social media and ten-second sound bites we’re reacting more than ever, which means we are thinking about things less than ever.
When we see an email, a tweet, or a post on Instagram that we object to we read it and then pass it on. Expressing our anger and frustration along with the original message.
Only it was false - who knew? It never happened. But your email and message are out there. Your opinion about nothing is making the rounds and people are believing it. It fits with how they’re feeling, and what they’re thinking. Even when we’re not.
Studies show fake is more often believed than the truth. Seriously, when did that start happening?
Fake is nothing new. Fake news. Fake deals. Fake Rembrandts. Fake has been with us for centuries and it happens because people need and want things.
They want to own a Rembrandt a Jackson Pollock or a 1914 Honus Wagner baseball card. They want to feel connected or right when so many things around them are out of their control.
So, we take the reins. We retweet the message. Re-post the image. It’s what the Congresswoman said, in session, on Thursday, and it's not right.
Only she wasn't in Congress, she was in Philadelphia celebrating her daughter’s birthday. It didn’t happen. The report was wrong.
But we still reacted. We didn’t think. We didn’t need to.
Others are doing it for us and we’re used to believing what seems real.
We’re told that the cereals in the supermarket aisle are good for us. That the treadmill is state-of-the-art. That one vitamin capsule is like eating two pounds of fresh kale.
We trust the source because we’re made to feel it’s reliable, and that it matches our sensibilities and we stop questioning it.
Today fake is real. We create it. We read it, we’re hard-pressed to tell the difference. It sounds right. It reads right. Someone nailed it. They understood us and know what we’ve been going through.
Ever wonder how the psychic knew your father died? Or that your dog ran away last week or your love life is about to improve?
Clues. Observations, probability, and surveys all bring in information that is then used to convince you someone knows what you’re going through. But they don’t.
The business guru you’re watching up on stage wasn’t there when your business failed, yet he seems to know what you went through and how it felt. It’s not magic, it’s marketing.
Then comes the promise. The program. The package of CDs.
But not everyone or everything is fake, far from it. Fake is easy. Real is hard.
Real takes work. It takes double-checking, verifying, and not accepting the first report about anything.
It takes knowing how to break down a fact into its constituent parts. When it was said. Who said it? Were they there? Who else was there, what did they see and hear?
Assuming the guy was cutting the line at Starbucks is easy to do because people do it all the time. It’s real. It happens. Just not every time.
There’s a difference. But with deep fakes and fake news, it’s getting harder to tell real from easy.
So, we keep reacting. We accept the report. The speech. The statistics that appear to come out of nowhere or from a college no one has ever heard of.
Unthinking America is a symptom of social media, its endless news feeds, algorithms, and being too busy, too harried too stressed, with too little cash while working two jobs.
We don’t have the time to do the research so we pick someone we believe we trust and make it easy on ourselves.
What happens when we don’t think and just react?
Mistakes are made, and accidents happen. People get elected that shouldn’t. People get believed when they shouldn’t be.
It’s a mess.
It’s preventable.
Trust less, check more. Unthinking is a habit.
Break it.