Thoughts from Dr. Joe: Responsibility and its online importance

By Joe Puglia

March 3, 2016 1:43 PM PT

You know what’s great about the Internet? Everybody gets a voice!

You know what’s not so great about the Internet? Everybody gets a voice!

More often than not these voices become mere static where issues and their zealots fall into a labyrinth and are subsequently sequestered from the true issues at hand.

This is the contemporary phenomenology for social media, or for lack of a better descriptor; it’s the Internet version of a kangaroo court. Social media has become the forum where the masses judge every phenomenon or human interest story expediently and severely. A social malady evolves whereby strangers, arguing their points of view, verbally assault other strangers with drive-by insults and conjecture. After their vitriol is gutted with volley and counter-volley, the angry mob forgets all about the issue and moves on to the next shiny object trending in the news feed. Subsequently, truth becomes a casualty and nothing is learned. The cycle continues again and again.

In social media, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to knock over a checkerboard and then turn to one’s opponent and brag about how you won. Today, the Internet is overrun with such types. It becomes difficult to find an honest dialogue where mutual respect for divergent ideas promotes a clear discussion.

This malady has become prevalent in our society because becoming intellectually vacuous is easy. It’s easy to worship at the altar of the laptop or smartphones and confront strangers in real-time. Social media has created immediacy ruled by hashtags and anonymous bullies where social media aficionados shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.

Should you feel the need to let your stream-of-consciousness take the reins, you can easily make an amusing joke, a shout-out, or take a drunken potshot at your least favorite politician. Reasoning, evidence, or rhetoric that could justify a position fall by the wayside. People often resort to sentimental platitudes that endorse their opinion rather than support it.

The presence of the “like” button on Facebook allows discussions to dissolve into contests of whose side is more popular. Being able to express blanket agreement allows one to support one side of an issue without having to give the slightest thought to the other side. And I have a difficulty understanding how easily it has become to express hatred because one has a different ideology. Is that what we’re becoming?

I recall drinking coffee and eating crullers at Dunkin’ Donuts on Third and Main in Dayton, Ohio, when I was in college. We’d debate the great issue of the ‘60s. We were philosophy, history and political science majors and we believed in the “Great Conversation,” the name given to the exchange of ideas that has been going on for thousands of years. Ideas that have to do with God, our world, relationships, truth, knowledge, existence, hope, despair and purpose. Instead of lazily hurling grammatically incorrect indignities toward one another, we worshiped at the altar of critical thought.

A taxonomy of cognitive thinking skills was first developed by Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s. He proposed there are six levels of cognitive thinking skills. These are broken down to lower level skills (remembering, understanding) and higher level skills (applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating). In today’s world of social media, the higher level skills of critical analysis are atrophying from the human understanding of debate. Will reverence to the Great Conversation become extinct?

Truth is a separate reality, which exists outside ourselves. Who owns the truth? To quote J. K. Rowling’s Dumbledore, “Truth ... is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with great caution.” However social media has made a bastard of truth. By listening to our assumptions, we lose the ability to distinguish the truth both within and outside ourselves. Perhaps having a voice entails having a responsibility.

JOE PUGLIA is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us.