“The truth resists simplicity.” – John Green
I was recently pondering on the nature of opinions, more specifically; the nature of opinions in modern times and how/if the nature of opinion has changed.
I realise discussions over social media’s impact on our lives are common but I haven’t been witness to much in the way of how the ease of expression we now enjoy, like my blogging right here, affects our opinions and how we come to them.
Now if you’ve not given much thought to opinion and bias, watch this video where Vlogbrother Hank Green (not John Green) explains bias pretty well
To come back to my main point however, technologies effect on opinion, we now all have a tool far more effective at expressing our views to a lot more people than our ability to speak verbally grants us.
For instance, you shout out in a high street “Obama is a socialist!” How many people are going to hear you, how many people will actually hear you correctly and how many people will be able to recipricate their opinions, maybe 50 people hear, 40 people hear correctly, and a few are going to be able to get a word in edge ways.
Now you do the same thing on facebook where you have, say, 200 friends (these are really rough guesstimates and you’d have thousands if you were famous) you have a potential audience of 200 people all able to read and re read your message as much as needed to understand it, as well as everyone getting a more or less fair opportunity to be heard.
This means that if someone wants to express some unregulated, stupid thought they can do so to much greater effect, but also people’s’ ability to ridicule that person and the thought and explain its fallacy is also heightened. I just don’t know which is the greater force.
ultimately I’m not convinced that the answers to these questions are as important as the questions themselves, awareness by analysing the way radically new forms of communication affect us is important so we don’t become a big, stupid hive mind. (or if you’re a redditor, a big ‘circlejerk’)
Next time I talk about Occupy Wall Street
I actually think technology has led to us being much less able to express ourselves properly. Sitting behind a screen, when you laugh you type “lol” or “:’)” and when you’re happy you type “:)”. Over time, your brain starts to associate happiness with the typing rather than the real-world expression, which leads to a lack of ability to express naturally in real life. Same goes for talking about things or sharing news – you tell all of the internet what’s going on, and then you have no talking point or news to share with people when you see them.
The fact that the line between telecommunication and face-to-face interaction has blurred so that they effectively walk hand-in-hand in everyone’s life is quite scary – it’s creating a new era of human communication (in that it’s really easy to keep in touch and up to date) but it’s destroying our ability to be deeply social. I don’t know if I love it or hate it.