Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
I’ve been on my phone too much lately. Ironic to say as I peck away on my phone’s keyboard typing this. But it’s true.
I’m already an introvert, and so sinking too much time into my phone, beyond writing this, and meditation, makes me a bit antisocial. Cooking dinner? I’m listening to a book. Entertainment, a game or time on TikTok. Comnections on Twitter. Checking investments. Listening to music. Checking email. Checking email some more. Chatting with my siblings. Doing the Wordle when my sisters share their results with me. Googling, watching videos, reading articles and news.
Not all of these are wasting time, but all of these add up to my phone taking too much of my attention. I need to tome it down. I need to be more present. I need to recognize how much this little device pulls me away from the world… and I need to find more balance.
“We are living in a redpill/blue pill moment, except people are colourblindandeveryonethinks they are taking the red pill.”
— — —
The TermsRed PillandBlue Pillrefer to a choice between revealing an unpleasant truth, represented by the red pill, or to remain in blissful ignorance, represented by the blue pill. These terms are in reference to the 1999 filmThe Matrix.~Wikipedia
The insightfulthingabout this is that there are a lot of people who are (unknowingly) choosing the blue pill. This can be summarized by 2 TikToks I’ve seen recently:
While these are American references, (welcome to using social media in Canada, that’s what you get), there are many conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers all over the world that think they’ve somehow taken the red pill, but are colourblind and have ignorantly taken the blue pill.
This is so much more dangerous that people who just choose the blue pill because that’s what they wanted. This is about people steadfastly believing that they have seen behind the (metaphorical) curtain. They “know” the unpleasant ‘Truth’.
Ignorance may be bliss but intentionally seeking out ignorance and claiming it is fact is outright dangerous.
Dangerous. Not mistaken, not misguided, not just ignorant. Dangerous.
Social media has amplified this danger. When Facebook posts with misinformation get shared 5 times as fast and as much as the information debunking the information; When QAnon can constantly change their stance(s) and people still believe, despite how wrong this ‘inside information’ has been; When crackpots that claim to be experts get more views than researchers who actually share the data… this is dangerous.
It’s one thing to choose the blue pill, it’s a whole other kind of scary thing when the blue pill is ignorantly chosen while the taker believes they are taking the red pill.
This is an interesting time that we live in. I find myself in a position where I need to question my own values. I don’t do this lightly. I don’t pretend that my values have suddenly changed. It’s just that present circumstances put me at odds with my own beliefs around freedom of speech.
I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I think that when a society sensors speech, they are on a dangerous path. I take this to an extreme. Except for slander, threats, and inciting violence, I think people have a right to say and believe what they want. I believe that taking away such freedom puts us on a perilous path where a select few get too much control, and can undermine our freedoms.
An example where I take this to the extreme would be agreeing with Noam Chomsky.
So now, even as an ardent defender of free speech, I find myself agreeing with YouTube’s decision to ban vaccine misinformation:
YouTube doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is limited to content that contradicts local health authorities’ or the WHO’s guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.
Two, four, eight, or sixteen years ago when YouTube began, I would have screamed ‘Censorship!’ at the idea of a platform banning free speech. Even now it bothers me. But I think it is necessary. The first problem is that lies and misinformation are too easily shared, and spread too easily. The second problem is that the subject area is one where too many people do not have enough information to discern fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience. The third problem is that any authentic discussion about these topics is unevenly biased towards misinformation. This last point needs explanation.
If I wanted to argue with you that Zeus the Greek God produces lightning and thunder when he is angry, I think everyone today would say that I was stupid to think such a thing. However, if I was given an opportunity to debate a scientist on this in a public forum, what inadvertently happens is that my crazy idea now gets to have an equal amount of airtime with legitimate science. These two sides do not deserve equal airtime in a public, linkable, shareable format that appears to give my opinion an equal footing against scientific evidence.
Now when dealing with something as silly as believing in a thunder god is the topic, this isn’t a huge issue. But when it’s scientific sounding, persuading and fear mongering misinformation that can cause harm, that’s a totally different situation. When a single counter example, say for example a person having adverse effects from a vaccine, becomes a talking point, it’s hard to balance that in an argument with millions of people not having adverse effects and also drastically reducing their risk of a death the vaccine prevented. The one example, one data point, ends up being a scare tactic that works to convince some people hearing the argument that the millions of counter examples don’t matter. And when social media platforms feed similar, unbalanced but misleading information to people over and over again, and the social media algorithms share ‘similar’ next videos, or targeted misinformation, this actually gets dangerous. It threatens our ability to weigh fact from fiction, news from fake news, science from pseudoscience. It feeds and fosters ignorance.
I don’t know how else to fight this than to stop bad ideas from spreading by banning them?
This flies in the face of my beliefs about free speech, but I don’t know any alternative to prevent bad ideas from spreading faster than good ones. And so while I see censorship as inherently evil, it is a lesser evil to allowing ignorance to spread and go viral. And while it potentially opens a door to less freedom, and I have concerns about who makes the decision of what information should be banned, I’d rather see a ban like this attempted, than for us to continue to let really bad ideas spread.
I thought in this day and age common sense would prevail and there would be no need to censor most if not all free speech. However it seems that as a society, we just aren’t smart enough to discern truth from cleverly said fiction. So we need to stop the spread of bad ideas, even if that means less freedom to say anything we want.
I know I’ve been writing a lot recently about QAnon, anti-makers, and anti-vaxxers. I’m going to continue that today with a bit of a rant:
Is it just me that thinks these conspiracy theory spinners are just idiots? I mean one crazy idea leads to another, which leads to another. They tie so many BS ideas together that you can’t keep track. And when one idea is debunked or one deadline for catastrophe is missed, it doesn’t diminish their fervour for the next conspiracy… debunking one idea does not phase their beliefs on the topic or any other topic, despite the fact that they are the ones making the connections. What’s worse, they seem to always want evidence, but refuse to believe any evidence provided is real.
Is it just me that thinks police should take water guns filled with blue food colouring to anti-mask protests and spray it all over them? If protesters are going to endanger themselves, let’s paint their faces blue for a couple weeks so that we can keep our distance from them when they return to normal society. That way when they come back from the protest and put masks on, and we usually can’t tell they were participating in risky behaviour, we would still know to keep very clear from them.
Is it just me that thinks we should enforce travel bans on people that refuse the vaccine? And while we are at it, if they end up in a hospital with expensive covid related issues after refusing the vaccine, they should have to pay medical bills for being stupid and adding an unnecessary burden to the Canadian economy.
Is it just me that wonders how in an age of unlimited information, stupidity can travel faster than intelligence? What is it about the human brain that makes not just dimwits, but also otherwise smart people too, believe that every government leader can be absolutely corrupt and yet only a single whistleblower is brave enough to come forward? The news is filled with scandals all the time. Humans don’t know how to keep a secret, but somehow there are cabals filled with rich people who live lives surrounded by servants, who can keep global conspiracies a secret for decades.
Is it just me that wonders if the threat of terrorism is greater from within our borders than from outside? That anti-common sense, extreme nationalist, and hate groups pose more of a threat to our societies than fundamentalist religious wing-nuts? The internal threat of stupidity is greater than the external threat of tyranny.
Is it just me that is fed up with cliff jumping lemmings calling me a sheep? I feel like I’m calling out the morons the same way they call out people who actually care about things like actual research and scientific facts. I know that this little rant won’t change anyone’s ridiculous beliefs in conspiracy theories, and will do nothing more than convince these delusional idiots that I’m somehow lost, or blind to some fantasy land reality they live in. But I feel good getting this little rant off my chest, and I’ll work on more convincing arguments again after today.
Here is the thing… it feels good to rant sometimes, but is it just me that thinks dialogue is the only way forward? That we actually have to engage and try to convince people that their loony ideas are wrong? Am I the only one that thinks it’s not good enough to roll your eyes and let these people believe their baseless theories without providing counter arguments? The answer to the spread of bad ideas is to counter them with good ideas. It’s painful to engage, but if we don’t have dialogue, if we don’t provide counter arguments, then we really are sheep, or lemmings… Then we are allowing a small group of small minded people to influence and engage with more people likely to follow them down a path of poor thinking. Is it just me that thinks this?
We live in an era of incredible potential. And yet when I opened my news feed this morning this is what I saw:
A misogynist Op-Ed that was clearly written with malice.
A racist group causing harm and violence.
An extremist left group doing the same.
An anti-mask gym owner saying he’ll continue to pay fines to keep his gym open.
A politician calling covid a ‘hoax pandemic’.
The largest iceberg ever, that broke off in 2017 thanks to global warming, is heading to islands likely to cause an ecological disaster.
Crazy.
When I think of the potential of humanity, I think of benevolence, creativity, generosity, love, and kindness.
When I open the news I see hate and ignorance. Today these stupid headlines came (except for the iceberg) from the country south of our borders. A country that’s supposed to be about equal opportunity, liberty, and justice. A country divided into two camps so opposed to the other side that they see the other as enemies more than neighbours (or I should say neighbors).
What does it mean to be human? What potential do we have as a species? What could we accomplish if we work together? What kind of world would we live in if we focused on what’s possible?
We can be better as a species. We can be peaceful. We can be kind. We can be loving. We can be more human.
Today marks 13 years since I sent my first Tweet. Twitter has influenced me enough that I even wrote a short (free) ebook to help people get started on it.
My use of Twitter has evolved considerably. It used to play a bigger role in my life because it was a gateway to learning about using technology and social media as a means to share ideas and seek out others doing the same. Now, I find that I transmit more than I engage, and when I engage it’s usually with people I’ve developed long term digital friendships with.
I also use it for news. I hate watching news, but going to the search page (tab) and seeing the trending hashtags is enough to keep me informed without being sucked into the drama and bias of a single news source on TV. This isn’t a comprehensive way to consume news, but these days I struggle to keep from being sucked into the most recent drama that streams constantly through news headlines, and a simple hashtag summary can succinctly let me know if I should dig deeper.
I have to say 13 years after starting that I romanticize and miss the ‘old Twitter’ days of people sharing links to blog posts they wrote and the marriage between Twitter and blogging that, while still there, is far less what Twitter is about. That said, my consumption of blogs as a primary place to engage online has diminished, while ironically I have become a prolific blogger, writing daily for the past 16 months. It’s easy to romanticize something that you simultaneously aren’t likely to want to return to. And so while I miss ‘old Twitter’ I must admit that as much as Twitter has changed, I have changed too.
Watching Twitter change, I do see some positives that I hope to see continue and here is one area that impresses me:
While other social media sites are permitting widespread sharing of fake and unproven information, Twitter is putting warnings like this on prominent and influential people who are spreading false claims.
And while I’m a huge supporter of free speech, and against censorship, I do believe that bad ideas can spread easily and we have an obligation to warn people when influential people are irresponsible enough to promote bad ideas. While the balance between freedom to share and obligation to inform is a delicate one, I commend Twitter for taking the risk in being a leader in this area.
As an aside, I think there is room for a new form of social media, one where people can have public conversations with only invited guests, and everyone watching can have a separate side conversation. These closed but public conversations can have a moderator who can pull in sidebar comments and/or commenters, and so observers can be invited in and involved, if moderators choose. Or, moderators can delete or even block rude, inappropriate trolls that are disruptive to the side conversation.
Wide open conversations seem to bring out the worst in people, especially anonymous people that hide behind anonymity and say nasty things they would never say if their identity were known. A social media site that was more conversational than a blog, that allowed a healthy debate to happen in public, could be something that really helped to create open dialogue in a way that can’t seem to happen on Facebook or Twitter… without the conversation degrading into a petty, angry pissing match where trolls undermine the conversation.
Until that new social media tool comes along, I’ll just keep plugging along on Twitter, playing with how I use it so that it’s useful to me.
“The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.” ~Plato
The world I see today has many people using the word justice… but in defence of unjust ideas.
This is the crazy world we live in.
People talk about defending their freedoms by doing things that undermine the communities they live in… the very communities that offer those freedoms!
No, enforcing a mask policy isn’t an infringement of your rights, it’s preventing a lockdown that will reduce your freedoms while we take care of our community.
No, stricter gun laws in the US are not infringing on your constitutional amendment rights, but they will reduce easy, dangerous, and deadly weapons access to unfit people that are likely to harm your community.
No, your flat earth or QAnon conspiracies based on pseudoscience and fake facts are not counter-arguments to actual science, and don’t get equal footing in an argument.
No, right wingers are wrong to think left wing ideals are a path to a socialist controlling government that will strip away your rights. And no, left wingers, being violent against opposing views, because you disagree with them, isn’t a left wing ideal: It’s fascist and authoritarian to block free speech.
No, media outlets you should not be sensationalizing the news by polarizing ideas. You are not reporting news when you do this, you are selling out. You are sacrificing factual reporting for the price of views and clicks. You are not reporting, you are entertaining, angering, and dividing people with bias on the verge of being called propaganda.
Justice, rights, freedoms, and truth are no longer things that have the meaning they intended. They are empty words filled with polarized and rationalized meanings shared by less convincing and less reliable sources. Each ‘side’ believes these words belong to them. But words only have meaning when their definitions are shared.
Lies are soft and squishy. They can be whatever shape you want. They are convenient. [They fit into any world view.] The Truth is hard and spiky. Hard to embrace. Worth embracing.
I’m absolutely amazed at how many (smart, educated) people are sucked into conspiracy theories and exaggerated (and clearly misrepresented) statistics that fit their world view… even when the theories are debunked.
Example : A US educator that I know shared this October 25, 2019 Joe Biden Tweet, which was a response to another tweet from a Washington Post article on pandemic preparedness:
We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores. https://t.co/1qqpgayUEX
This is the top reply which has been retweeted 71 times and liked 359 times at the time of me sharing this:
It’s absolutely ridiculous that someone with such influence can spread a conspiracy theory that the pandemic was planned. But it’s convenient. It fits her world view.
The problem is that is so much easier to cherry pick lies and convenient half-truths than it is to actually embrace and meaningfully interpret facts that don’t match biased opinions.
Sometimes lies are easy and the truth is hard… it’s spiky… But we want to live in a society where the hard truth is embraced, even if it isn’t something we want to hear.
It’s really hard to avoid rage as a driving force in the news today. Article after article, video clip after video clip, there is anger, upset, and rage. There is a link between what we think and how we feel, and that used to be determined by us. Now it is determined by the headlines we read and the videos we watch.
Cognition used to drive emotion, now emotion draws us towards information and that information caries a bias that fuels anger in one of two opposing ways:
1. Disgust: How can this happen in our society today? What kind of world are we living in? This is so wrong!
2. Rebuke: This is not a crisis. This is overblown! Everything is sensationalized.
These two reactions towards the same topic fuel even greater rage. If you think something is completely unacceptable and I ask you, ‘what’s the big deal?’, how does that make you feel?
Anger does not invite clear thought. It does not invite discourse that we can learn from. It does not foster a healthy environment.
It upsets me that headlines are so geared towards rage and anger. It saddens me that I still follow the headlines, clicking links and watching videos. I’m not impervious to the emotional draw. It’s similar to slowing down on the highway to see why emergency vehicles are pulled over in the oncoming lanes… we are pulled in by the macabre.
It can not be healthy to draw our attention to the world through rage. It clouds the truth, hides it in bias based on anger. This is not how we should be learning about the going’s on in our world. This is not news.
I enjoy seeing funny quotes attributed to the wrong people. Like these two examples:
The second one is an assault to the senses of fiction and science fiction fans. When the joke is obvious, there is comedy in the creation of these fake attributions. However, we are living in an era where Truth seems more and more subjective.
What’s scary about this is that I consider myself fairly objective, but I’m finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. What I do know is that newspapers today come with tremendous bias, and something as simple as this chart from two years ago is even more exaggerated now, with papers moving further towards the extremes:
Here is an example of something that I know little about, and feel that the more I read, the further I am from having a clear understanding of where to put a value on what’s true: Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
Excerpt: THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”
Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.
Excerpt: Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients.
An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.
The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.
Of the physicians surveyed, 3,308 said they had either ordered a COVID-19 test or been involved in caring for a coronavirus patient, and 2,171 of those responded to the question asking which medications were most effective.
So, the ‘evidence’ presented in the second article came well before the the first article was printed. Which article holds more ‘Truth’?
First, if you had to guess, which of these newspapers is more Left-of-Centre – Liberal and which of these papers is more Right-of-Centre – Conservative?
Let’s have a look at the sources on MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check. (Full disclosure, I have not checked the reliability of this website.)
Take a moment to read the final, bolded comments that I clipped from this fact check website about each paper. They would suggest the Post being more reliable than the Times because of a lack of fact checking at the Times. That said, the source for the survey linked to in the Times article checked out when I looked into it. The same source, Sermo, is now toting Remdesivir use more than Hydroxychloroquine, and even then stating that, “Remdesivir Seen as Only Moderately Effective”.
I don’t have the time or mental energy to go fact-checking every article I read, but I do find myself evaluating the source of the information a lot more. However, quite honestly, even when I do that it has now become blatantly easy to read the bias of the reporter woven into almost every news article that’s based on a ‘hot’ topic. How can you look to the news for objectivity when that objectivity is blatantly disregarded?
I’ve now started reading headlines with the following ‘BS Filter’ as a lens: “Does this article headline anger me, or try to anger me? If the answer is ‘yes’, I either ignore the article, or I open it with my ‘BS detectors’ fully engaged. Click bait articles tend not to be focused on sharing any kind of ‘Truth’.
In this day and age of abundant information, I thought Truth would rise above the BS, but that hasn’t been the case. Neil Postman said,
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
It seems that there is an information war on both our capacities to think, and our capacities to seek the Truth.
