I Am Completely Serious

What we see through social media is a generation of ignorant social activists. Young men and women all too willing to care about and defend something they don’t truly understand and refuse to educate themselves further on because they assume the limited information they receive has been vetted by someone more knowledgeable than themselves. This happens on both sides of the fence, with both conservatives and liberals.

I’ve seen arguably intelligent young men and women stand up at banquets and rallies, demanding answers about things like healthcare, DOMA, federal military actions. Asking questions about things they’ve seen on Facebook, on twitter, things that they’ve taken little to no time to research for themselves, and they look like fools. No matter their age, they paint themselves with a red mark that announces ‘I’m not mature enough to be here, to discuss these issues’.

But even so, it isn’t truly about age. It’s about social awareness. You are not discounted until you make a mistake. Say the wrong thing or quote the wrong statistic. Until then, your legitimacy remains intact.

Tumblr is like this.

I’ve seen people furious over gay rights legislation that doesn’t actually exist. Wars that haven’t happened. Most recently text posts with tens of thousands of notes alleging that China and Russia are going to go to war with the US over Syria.

Blogs relaying damaging misinformation written by individuals who can’t seem to be bothered to read a newspaper or use google properly. This is a crippling trend, and no one sees it.

These people get untold attention and affirmation until one person with a large enough follower count points out the flaw in their argument. Corrects the mistake, and shifts the tide. But this doesn’t fix the thousands of people who liked and reblogged the original post. The damage is done.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from working on political campaigns, very little is more damaging than an activist who argues only one side of the story without recognizing the existence of the other; because your opinion, no matter how solid and seemingly factually based, is invalid the second your audience realizes they know more than you.

And the result of all of this is a generation of young activists who don’t understand why they aren’t being taken seriously.

- a recent conversation with a colleague regarding social media (via onawingandaswear)

This isn't a generational thing, or even a people-who-use-social-media thing. It's just a thing that's gotten easier to track with the advent of social media. And because social media's more heavily used by younger people, that's where it's most visible.

Manufactured belief and outrage is part of the performance of group identity: people convince themselves to believe bullshit, and talk about it in public to make it more "real," to show whose side they're on. It's a very basic part of human behavior.

For example, today three of my students convinced themselves, over the course of about three minutes, that none of them had thrown a pen across the room. At the beginning of those three minutes, they had all been aware that Mr. X was very guilty. Then, they realized I was going to punish him for it.

And they didn't like people being punished for throwing things, because they had all thrown things in class, at some point in their lives. They were on the side of Kids Who Throw Things In Class, not the side of Mean Teachers Who Don't Like It When Kids Throw Things In Class! I was being so unfair. And Mr. X probably hadn't even done anything wrong!

By the end of the three minute period, all three were angrily and sincerely defending the position that someone else had sneaked into the classroom and thrown a pen while I wasn't looking. They'd named a suspect and everything, a guy they knew had acted up in another of my classes the day before. Very solid work, worthy of any corrupt justice system protecting one of its own in any historical era.

A couple hours later, argument over and half-forgotten, Mr. X grinned sheepishly at me. "Too bad about that pen getting thrown and disrupting class, huh?"

Yeah, man. Too bad.

In the same way that my fifth-period math class convinced themselves of the presence of a dirty spy from my sixth-period, sixty-year-old politicians convince themselves of the existence of "death panels," and Tumblr users convince themselves that getting a passport now requires an invasive twenty-page survey. No real difference in the social behaviors at work.

But if any of these people had to put their own money on this shit, they wouldn't, because they know they're full of shit. It's not about being right, it's about being on the right side. And that's no bigger a problem today than it was a hundred years ago.

So, you know. It's a really bad problem.

But it's worse when Congress does it, is what I'm saying.