Social media can encourage people to think ideas have great weight based only on popularity. The more creative a statement, the more it proliferates. The funnier ones get lots of laughs, and who wouldn’t want to enjoy a momentary escape from life’s difficulties?
This relatively new form of worldwide communication has precedence: the Wild, Wild West. We don’t have rules of behavior that most people agree on, and we have few ways to discourage bad behavior. We tend to do what they did in the Old West: form a posse whenever needed.
The posse can be mistaken, of course. The pursued might be innocent. A civilized justice system requires time to get facts straight, allowing the accused to mount a defense while maintaining innocence until proven guilty. As yet, our social media cannot accommodate such ponderous safeguards.
The social media posse rounds up riders with an effective approach: appealing to emotion, which may be valid. Humans have keen senses of fairness and justice, especially regarding ourselves. We know when we have received mistreatment, and it makes us mad. We are less keenly aware when we proliferate mistreatment. As Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The Old West, however, was sparsely populated to the extent that when a posse formed, there was never an opposing posse. The call to round up a social media posse today also generates opposition. If there’s a bad guy, he is likely to get away while the posse on his tail tries to fend off the posse on its tail.
What are all those people trying to accomplish who cry, “Woke!” in the loudest voices they can? They have riled up their emotions against many other groups who try to encourage good behavior with charismatic rallying cries. But emotional support does not shed light, one way or another, on the merit of an idea.
The woke posse seems weary of being pursued by not just one other posse but several. A child can be overwhelmed by too much teaching in too short of a time span. Of course, black lives do matter. Homosexuals are people, too. Humans of all colors, races, and religions should be respected as equals. But does the librarian have a special societal responsibility to set up a table with books by and about lesbians, foreigners, trans-sexuals, women of color, Muslims, Native Americans, and anyone who is not white, male, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, or upper-class privileged? Shouldn’t we be able to find these books in their usually shelved locations, because we are already enlightened readers interested in these subjects and authors?
In fairness to women named Karen, should we refuse to join the posse that accuses certain women of being “obnoxious, angry, entitled, racist, middle-aged whites who try to police other people’s behaviors” with a single label? Perhaps we are overly tempted to shut people up by joining gangs that throw them into boxes. Isn’t that argumentum ad hominem or something?
Or am I mansplaining? Do I have an undeserved privilege granting me a soapbox from which to preach and condescend to ignorant, unsophisticated masses? If only they would listen to reason!
Since people who post on social media must have the internet close at hand, why don’t they bone up on fallacious reasoning? Wikipedia has a nice list of things to avoid. After all, even if a large posse seems full of emotional people, they may have valid points. With the rules in such flux, the chosen methods may not be the most effective, but we owe them at least some consideration of the validity of their concerns. Yet, we can easily join one posse or another due to flawed reasoning. The Wikipedia list is so long that one might hypothesize that wrong thinking is inherently human. Get to the end of the article and see if you don’t want to cry out, “Woke!”
Maybe we should all try to have a little compassion for each other. Be careful before you think, “What a Karen! Can you believe her behavior?” or “He’s such a mansplainer! Blah, blah, blah, I’m closing my ears!”
We like labels because they facilitate faster decision-making and sorting, given the rough ocean of ideas we swim in these days. Similarly, we prefer to close our minds, content with the adequacy of our current conceptions, suspicious of the benefit versus cost of trying for further improvement.
I must admit that (maybe it’s my advanced age) I don’t care to pay attention to your preferred pronouns. I’m so engaged in trying to think straight about essential thoughts I don’t have time to monitor and self-check constantly, “Oh, wait, are you a she, he, they, or ze?” Have a little compassion. I understand that your gender may not be apparent. But we all might get along better if we listen to what people mean more than what they say. That’s no easier than gender identification but calls for patience and restraint.