For better and for worse

I've spent the past few weeks off of Twitter. I've done this because the never-ending stream of (usually justified) outrage made me feel kind of terrible. I found myself doing things I normally enjoyed, but would still be holding on to frustration like I'd just been in an argument in real life. 

In addition, the stuff people were most often angry about were also things I couldn't do anything about beyond a retweet or an affirmation. In other words, nothing meaningful.

All that said, Kevin Drum argues that "Social media is making the world a better place; quit griping about it". I actually agree with most of what he says, though I'd add that it's not necessarily better for people like me who were already news junkies. 

First, he makes a couple points on social media's place in the history of communication that are worth considering:

...[T]he internet boasts an immediacy that allows it to pack a bigger punch than any previous medium. But this is hardly something new. Newspapers packed a bigger punch than the gossipmonger who appeared in your village every few weeks. Radio was more powerful than newspapers. TV was more powerful than radio. And social media is more powerful than TV.

The immediacy piece of social media is something that isn't analyzed enough. We humans seem to have a cognitive bias to respond to whatever is in front of us. If that's a Facebook or Twitter feed, then that will give whatever is on the screen a sense of urgency that 99 times out of 100, it doesn't deserve. 

Along with the immediacy of social media, it also gives the same visual weight to viewpoints that otherwise wouldn't deserve it. A random blogger wouldn't otherwise merit the same consideration as, say, Jake Tapper. The upshot is that we see more of everything, including topics that we would've previously never been aware of:

...[B]roadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary. Human nature being what it is, it’s hardly surprising that we end up thinking the world is getting worse.

I generally agree with Drum's point here. I don't think the world is more racist or hateful than it used to be — a visit to the Holocaust Museum or the National Civil Rights Museum should disabuse anyone of that notion — but fringe viewpoints now get exposure that didn't happen nearly as much 20 years ago.

What is new and frightening is the role that Fox News (and a couple of related websites) play in echoing, legitimizing, and amplifying conspiracy theories and thinly veiled racism. They have monetized feeding the dark corners of human nature at a scale we haven't seen before. The idea of a major TV news network devoting their prime-time lineup to content that would make the editors of Pravda blush would've been unheard of a few decades ago when Walter Cronkite was the biggest gatekeeper of TV news.

Drum makes an interesting argument that there is some benefit to the "more exposure for everything" era we are in:

Instead, though, consider a different possibility: the world is roughly the same as it’s always been, but we see the bad parts more frequently and more intensely than ever before. What has that produced? 

Well, sure, it helped produce Donald Trump. There’s a downside to everything. But what it’s also produced is far more awareness of all those dark corners of the world. And while that may be depressing as hell, that awareness in turn has produced #MeToo. It’s produced #BlackLivesMatter. It’s produced a rebellion among the young. It’s produced the #Resistance. It’s produced more awareness of extreme weather events. It’s produced an entire genre of journalism, the health care horror story, that in turn has produced a growing acceptance that we need something better.

I could go on, but the point I want to make is simple: if you want to make things better, you first have to convince people that something bad is happening. 

I again mostly agree with his point, though it's awfully depressing to be reminded that we humans pretty much always need a crisis to spur real action. But his point about the world being more or less as great and terrible as it has always been rings true. 

The context we live in has changed a great deal, but I don't think human nature is all that different. For better and for worse.