This post on discernment was spurred by two experiences I had yesterday. It began with a person in a conversation stating a fact they believed to be true. My news sources state the opposite so I asked for his source. “The whole internet knows,” was his reply. Clearly the whole internet doesn’t know or I would at least have heard his fact bandied somewhere.
While I’ve lamented that it has become increasingly hard to get search to be responsive, I mostly view it as an irritation that means I have to work harder to outwit the limits of the algorithm. What was suddenly staring me in the face was that not everyone recognizes this and because they don’t, they do not question what they view.
I know you could call me naive for saying that. It’s not that I don’t recognize people can believe the unbelievable. It’s that I hadn’t imagined a significant number of people will accept one single point of view or use a single source of information as the ultimate deliverer of incontrovertible facts without confirmation. I guess I expected that they’d at least explore other points of view in real life and then follow up to gain perspective.
It’s what I did after that conversation. I went home and searched for the fact they’d presented and then read the results. I did it because it’s possible my sources were wrong. I did it to understand the point of view this person has. I did it because I was curious and I find it interesting to explore.
But I am coming to realize I may be more of an oddity than I thought. I believed the majority of people approach the world with a willingness to learn and will not accept at face value what an algorithm sends them. After all, people hate to give up control and that’s giving up control to a machine. Who would do that? Apparently, a lot more folks than I recognized.
It is important, and will be critical as we go forward, to recognize that what you know as the whole internet is an ever-increasingly smaller portion of a portion of the whole internet. Algorithms plus AI = a rapidly narrowing range of responses. If we are not willing to work hard to broaden the input we view and increase our level of discernment, we may be sunk as humans.
A few hours after the aforementioned event, I witnessed an act of online cruelty. The perpetrator sat an arm’s length from me and was proud of what they had done. I was, and remain, shocked and frightened by what I saw. I’m not sure how I’ll address it. (For the record, the recipient is okay.)
When a recipient of cruelty lacks a larger view of the world and enough real-life support, online cruelty can do real damage. We have to keep our thinking free of influence. We have to broaden our base of knowledge. We have to be nimble and willing to accept that we can be wrong.
If we don’t, we are in danger of making life-altering decisions based on fiction we’re fed in reels, health choices we see in marketing campaigns, and lower standards for what constitutes ethical, moral treatment of other humans.
Yes, I know we’re already several miles down this road. And yes, I understand that we’re not all that discerning in real life. But we are at a critical, critical juncture in how we incorporate our online lives into our real lives – one that feels more important and more dangerous than a year ago.
Outrage generates clicks. Clicks narrow our world into things we can be outraged about. And so it goes until we make an effort to do something different. Yesterday tells me must exert more energy toward developing discernment immediately!