Originally Posted by Artful Todger
I think the real problem is that many people they are too lazy or unable to look into finding out the truth about things.
The net is the most useful tool for investigating that humanity has ever had. Shame average people use it mostly for mindnumbingly inane cr@p like social media.
Social media in and of itself is not ‘crap’, at least not directly. Its what social media has developed into that makes it crap. That is essentially every application and every user vying for the attention of millions of monkey brains and trying to keep that attention for as long as possible. Unfortunately those monkey brains have one serious downfall and thats fatigue and emotions. Meaning most monkey brains go onto social media platforms to ‘relax’ and whether they know it or not, to have an ‘emotional’ response to things. Whether thats being happy, sad, angry, and ect.
Unfortunately, the truth, or at least the whole truth doesn’t usually fit into the perfect ‘monkey brain attention grabber’ mold very well. As the truth in most things can take serious time to explore properly, and typically the emotional release from the whole truth is far more underwhelming than half truths or even straight up lies that target some emotional response directly. Its the same downfall that almost every media in the world, long before social media, was slowly moving towards. Hell radio in the early 2000’s was complete and udder obnoxious garbage compared to the stale and boring way it started. TV as well, went from a fairly dry albeit entertaining experience, and slowly but surely developed into a market about how to ‘grab’ the attention of every household no matter at what cost.
I dont think its really all the fault of people being to lazy to find the truth. I should clarify I do think thats a PART of the problem, just not the whole problem. I think a larger part of this is that people genuinely do look for answers, but unfortunately due to poor education and a misunderstanding of how the better part of the internet treats THEM as the product and not the content itself. It leaves them susceptible to both finding and believing the half truths and lies they find.
My hope, and if i had any role in the world of public education that I would be pushing for right now, is that we can develop newer generations to understand the internet as a business better. We really need to be teaching kids how to distinguish information that is manufactured as a product versus information that was manufactured from knowledge. So hopefully, they are more eager to meet things they find online with skepticism and are more willing to ignore their monkey brain when looking for the truths in some topic.