Why everyone is wrong and that's the point.
Gene Wilder is dead. I know because it felt as though all 1K+ of my friends on Facebook shared something about it. Anyone who’s had a parent remind them (read: bug them) to do their chores knows how frustrating it can be to hear unwanted news repeatedly. The seemingly endless stream of posts and #RIPs began to irk me similarly. Is it okay for my friends to publicly agonize over the end a life they had seemingly little to no amount of care for a day prior? When what I expect to be a thriving collection of life updates and click-bait turns into a torrent of monotonous mourning, it seems as though something has failed. My friends feel the need to express their loss and agony publicly, but I feel overwhelmed with the amount of outpouring. The line between appropriate expression and excess is elusive. For a few days every time a celebrity dies social media morphs from a forum of self-expression to a dull roar of different voices all saying the same thing.
Mourning death isn’t the only way social media becomes an echo chamber. Any opinion be it political, religious, social, or otherwise is emphasized and enhanced online. This echo chamber isn’t an accident. Big data has been the heart of Facebook’s mode of operations for a long time, and now the company leverages all sorts of techniques to categorize different aspects of our lives. You can learn a lot about how different companies categorize you by what posts you see often, and Facebook will even tell you how it sorts you in categories like your US Political affiliation (I’m a Moderate). Most companies, including social media sites, want you to use their services as much as possible. When it comes to Facebook, it can be pretty useful. I don’t need to lean on traditional news media to tell me what I should know about current events and the world around me. Through social media, all the stories I’m probably interested in get filtered to me through my natural network of friends. Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy and author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You cites the real danger of these algorithms in an interview with NPR: the potential to never see opinions that differ from yours and worse—never know other opinions exist.
This lack of conflict and abandonment of debate strikes at the core of growth. In a fantastic sermon on one of my favorite passages in the Bible, Matt Chandler, lead pastor at The Village Church (a Southern Baptist church in Texas) reminds his congregation that people don’t mature through success and perfection. “You learned by failing. You learned by scrapping your knees. You learned by thinking you’re right only to realize you’re wrong. That’s how all of us have matured.” I think that’s the most important lesson to remember in the face of the social media filter bubble. There are lessons to be learned everywhere and all of us could be maybe be wrong, even when we feel absolutely right. When I have a committed belief and every one of my close friends rally behind me, I usually grow pretty confident in that belief. When I absent-mindedly check Facebook and Snapchat and see those same opinions rehashed by a multitude of millennials, there’s no way I’ll ever think I’m wrong or possibly learn anything new.
Sometimes social media makes us feel like we can’t possibly be wrong. When someone somehow breaks that fever dream, most of us end up getting pretty defensive. It feels good to be affirmed. It’s awesome to feel like you’ve figured things out. I think that’s what makes debates in a technological world so intense. It’s easier than ever to tell someone else they’re 100% wrong because any opinion we hold can be backed up by thousands of our friends and online acquaintances. The most dangerous part of the filter bubble isn’t just our removal from differing opinions, it’s the illusion that every debate is black and white. The lie I feel most clearly illustrated online is the concept that for every debate there is a right answer and a plethora of wrong ones. The grey is missing from our lives online. Squishy answers and fuzzy conclusions don’t exist anymore. That’s a shame. Most answers in life aren’t cut and dry.
Debates rage for many reasons, but the conclusion is almost always a compromise. It’s an fact I saw first hand in college. Syracuse University makes the news often, but for one of my semesters in Upstate New York, they were all there for one reason: a protest. Students occupied the main office building on campus to demand the chancellor and his staff amend policies concerning various aspects of student life on and around campus. 18 days later, the students left and the chancellor accepted some, but not close to all, of the students’ policy changes. The protest at SU was one of many campus protests across the country in 2015 and 2016. One of the most well known confrontations occurred at Yale after Halloween in 2015. Various students in one of the residence halls felt the staff charged with running the hall failed to foster an environment where they felt safe to be themselves.
The idea of safe spaces in academia hasn’t calmed down. The debate over just how “safe” or “comfortable’ universities should be for students was important enough for The Atlantic to run a cover story on the issue a year ago; a story many still debate today. Coddling minds and avoiding conflicting ideas is such a hot-button issue the University of Chicago felt the need to warn accepted students about their university’s stance in the debate. Ultimately, I think I end up siding with UofC on this one. Not because I think they’re necessarily right, but because I don’t know who is and I want to find out.
As a kid the worst part of arguing with my parents was when it felt like they weren’t even listening to my argument. On Facebook, in the courtyard at Yale, and all over my life today it feels like fewer and fewer people are trying to hear other sides of the debate. When San Fransisco QB Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem this NFL preseason, tempers flared again on my Facebook feed. The sides were clearly laid out. People took their stand. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, but no one wanted a conversation. I am perfectly comfortable with others having different opinions than mine, but what really got under my skin was an open letter from one policeman to the 49er QB. In the letter the policeman continually belittles Kaepernick and his opinions. Each paragraph works to systematically ridicule the notion that the QB deserves an opinion at all. The idea that one man is so wrong and another so right that a debate isn’t even worth having scares me.
We learn from debate. We grow from conflict. The social media filter bubble is a helpful tool for parring down and digesting all the information we could potentially find on the internet. The danger comes when we drift to the notion that anyone who doesn’t belong in our bubble doesn’t belong in the debate. If found out Gene Wilder was dead thanks to Facebook’s echo chamber. I also discovered the danger of eliminating dissenting thoughts from our lives. Vox’s Betsy Aimee summed everything up well at the end of a story from April 2016, “It’s worth examining how we find common ground with those who disagree with us even at a time when it seems we are more divided than ever. We need to dig in and get a little dirty.” There is a reason everyone believes what they do. We're all a little bit right when it comes to our opinions, that's why we believe in them. It's important to remember we're usually a little bit wrong too. Finding that middle ground is the ultimate goal of any debate.
Heck, even Donald Trump can find the energy to get out of his comfort zone and try to live a moment in the shoes of someone else.