Jon GingerichJon Gingerich

This year has reminded me how difficult contemporary satire is. After all, what purpose does satire serve in a world where we’re already forced to confront absurdity every day?

This sentiment certainly applies to the 2016 election, but it also works as a general comment on the ways in which we’re inclined to discuss pretty much any critical issue facing us today. The fact is, we have more information at our disposal than any time in history, and access to virtually limitless voices from around the globe, yet most of us remain abjectly uninformed. With very little exception, the vast majority of political opinion I come across on social media anymore is merely the result of manufactured consensus, overcooked narratives copied and pasted wholesale from either a network news cycle that focuses on entertainment over facts or a horde of dubious online “news” sites that have become a wonderful resource for people who would rather live with their own fictions instead of what actually happened in the world on any given day.

This phenomenon is occurring across the political spectrum. Social media not only serves to reinforce our social identities; its habit of reducing complex, nuanced issues into a series of abridged soundbytes is having an injurious affect on our collective ability to think critically. We remain so adamant about maintaining those identities and so immutably incapable of differentiating fact from spin anymore that our resulting public stances seem to suggest a divisive binary, a set of mutually exclusive terms that doesn’t represent the world in which we live. Our choices, according to the Internet, can be only one of two things: the conservative option or the liberal option.

You’ll find this fallacy everywhere in our discourse today. You’re either against police officers killing unarmed black men, or you’re against the senseless killing of police officers. You either supported Britain’s exit from the European Union, or you wholeheartedly endorsed the sum of tariffs and austerity measures imposed by the EU against Britain. You’re either an advocate for gun control, or you support all Americans’ limitless access to every type of firearm anywhere and everywhere. If you endorse a politician, that means you agree with him/her 100-percent on every issue. And naturally, all political candidates with whom we disagree are Hitler.

Needless to say, no reasonable person thinks this way. Condemning violence against one group of people doesn’t imply condoning it against others. We can understand the dire economic implications the Brexit may pose for Britain yet sympathize with a country’s desires to maintain its sense of national autonomy. Setting limits on firearm purchases for people who clearly shouldn’t have them isn’t exactly a rescindment of the Second Amendment. We can vote for a political candidate not out of support but out of necessity, especially when the alternative seems appalling. This all makes common sense. Just don’t try saying it online.

social media

If pressed, I think you’d find most conservatives you know are probably liberal on a few issues, and vice versa (the 2016 presidential election confirms this: we currently have a recently-registered Democrat running as the GOP candidate and, arguably, the most hawkish conservative candidate to ever hold the Democratic ticket). People are complex, but this isn’t how we’re being conditioned to view each other. Depending on what team we’re on, we know only that conservatives are uneducated, racist brutes or liberals are crypto-communists whose hatred of corporate profit is rivaled only by their disdain for the Constitution. We have to oversimplify the intellectual content of our language in order for others to understand us; we have to resort to caricature and create archetypes in order to communicate the issues being presented. There is no alternative solution, no two ways of doing things, no shades of gray — only black and white, right and wrong, saviors and supervillains.

Social media has proven itself a disappointing venue for communication, because there’s a salient lack of tolerance for ideas that don’t comport with our own, because we can curate these online venues to be fact-free zones, spaces we inhabit not to inform ourselves and others but to confirm our own biases. Every news item can be editorially reengineered to reinforce our hermetic worldviews. Every headline is an indictment of how others are wrong and a justification for why we’re right.

Perhaps this helps explain the recent debate surrounding “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” occurring on our college campuses, or the widespread practice of taking up random social causes online that make us feel good about ourselves even though doing so does absolutely nothing to actually fix the problems that have us so worked up in the first place. Some of us have apparently convinced ourselves that reality can be sanitized for our convenience, that the rules that govern our cloistered online interactions can somehow be applied to life away from a computer. Suffice to say, these expectations are going to make the “real world” a very challenging place for some people.