The Problem with Social Media
Gary Stager,
Stager-to-Go,
Apr 04, 2011
I'm a little bit sympathetic with Gary Stager's point here. I've seen the comment section in YouTube, Huffington Post, CBC, Globe and Mail, Kos, and the rest of them. As the list of comments numbers into the hundreds, the opinions become less considered, more extreme and even offensive. But unlike Stager, I don't blame social media. These comment forums are just the outlets though while the bile flows. We ought to be looking at what caused this sort of outpouring in the first place, a toxic media environment in which the one-liner on Springer or Carson was the peak of wisdom, where the crazies are elevated to a platform and represented as normal, where insult, innuendo, and ignorance are propagated as punditry. Combine that with an education system where repeating what you are told is the highest virtue, and the wonder would be that you get anything else in the comments.
You reap what you sow, and in these disgusting comment threads the political and media elite are seeing themselves reflected, and are repulsed at what they see. As they should be. But shutting down the comments is not the answer; that's just a guarantee that nothing will change, that people can pay hundreds of dollars to hear political leaders tell them all is right with the world while meanwhile the rest of us are treated to I Love Lucy or Everybody Hates Chris. If we did not have the eruptions we see in the comment threads, how else would we see how poorly we have used the potential of print, film and electronic media over the last 50 years.
You reap what you sow, and in these disgusting comment threads the political and media elite are seeing themselves reflected, and are repulsed at what they see. As they should be. But shutting down the comments is not the answer; that's just a guarantee that nothing will change, that people can pay hundreds of dollars to hear political leaders tell them all is right with the world while meanwhile the rest of us are treated to I Love Lucy or Everybody Hates Chris. If we did not have the eruptions we see in the comment threads, how else would we see how poorly we have used the potential of print, film and electronic media over the last 50 years.
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