The Social Media Philosophy Project

Social Media is Not Lessening Attention-Spans!

Was This Man A Fascist?

tl;dr

How many of us see this all the time? How many of us dread it? How many of our grandiose (and largely self-appointed) curators of culture gnash their teeth when, after honing their prose and citing their sources for weeks to write that perfect editorial, all they see is

too long;didn’t read

And the parents and educators moan in the same way when, instead of reading the Official and Sanctioned view of a given subject, whether it is the Bible or a first-year “Introduction to Economics”, their students supplement their reading assignments with trips to Wiki and 30 other websites. Professors, in frustration at losing the keys to the Halls of Learning, fling lies about Wikipedia and insult the web in general. “Anyone can put anything up on there,” they scoff. Once, after a professor of mine said this, I asked if he had ever looked at Wikipedia and how it worked, had seen the dedicated people editing and curating its content, or had looked at how Wiki cited sources, with links to the studies and data so we could go see for ourselves. He stared at me blankly for a moment and then started babbling something incoherent about how he only really used the internet for email. He didn’t know anything about Wikipedia, but he instinctively loathed it. Why? Because it breaks down the walls…it gives us, the reader/learner/user of information, the ability to create our own story from the pieces of evidence and data that can be presented.

It takes away their power to control the narrative.

Any piece of “knowledge” around is really a story about observations and thoughts about observations. In the past, newspapers, professors, and other curators of culture have controlled these stories. The Civil War was simply a series of experiences and events…what gives it meaning is a story we tell about it. Some people (most people, I hope) tell a story about a battle over slavery and the first true “culture wars” between racist and non-racist Americans, with President Lincoln as a hallowed hero. But other stories are told about Lincoln as a fascist who declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists critical of his policies, and forced America into a type of economic and social subjugation worse than any slavery. Which story is “true”? Which is “false”? It really depends on what you think after you look at all the facts. I prefer a story of the movement toward social equality, but the other story is valid, in the sense that the events did occur. But which one you believe is largely an idealogical issue more than one of fact, and that’s where narratives can get you…they are guided by ideologies, and ideologies are pretty much all hokum, with no real evidence or reasoning behind them.

We make our own stories.

When we take in our data in small, bite-size (byte-size?) pieces, we start putting them together ourselves. We start taking the facts and observations, the bits and pieces we get from reading twelve articles, looking at pictures, and reading tweets, blog posts, etc., and make our own narratives, our own understanding of “truth”. And that really pisses people like professors and op-ed writers for the New York Times off. They want your entire view to be their view, not made up of bits and pieces from all over the place. They can’t control what you think if you do that. When you refuse to read their twelve-page piece on the Middle East or the Green movement, the don’t want you leaving after three paragraphs, fact-checking their claims, and cross-referencing what they say with eight other sources…they want you to think what they think. That’s why they wrote the piece in the first place. And when you go around looking things up and checking their sources, you don’t end up thinking what they want  you to think.

It’s not that we’re not paying attention, we’re just not paying attention to what they want us to.

Studies, articles, and tweets pop up all over, every day it seems, about how people of my generation, spoiled on TV, computers, and video games, have no attention-span, can’t focus, and have fragmented work ethics. This is not the case. We spend hours focused on the minutiae of our Twitter accounts, the apps on our phones, our contact lists. We spend months and years playing the same online video game, engaged in long-term goals that often take months to accomplish. We’re focused, we get the information, we know what we want to know…we just aren’t doing it like they want us to. So long as we get our information from dozens of sources, that information, that story about the world we call “knowledge” cannot be controlled.

Related posts:

1. The Ultimate Meme: #iloveyou
2. Social Media Misinformation, Disinformation, and Just Plain Stupidity
3. Do We Use Social Media or Does It Use Us?
4. Identity in Social Media
5. Online Privacy in a Social World