5:00PM
I see a lot of division on the internet these days—much more than I actually see in person. In person, people seem to get along quite well. I remember going to a few of the campaign rallies for the candidates for the governor’s office of Michigan. The people there seemed pretty relaxed, not so divisive, and these were the ones dedicated enough to show up to the in-person events!
What I see on the internet is different, especially on certain platforms. Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and others seem to ratchet up the divisiveness. Oh, I can’t forget Facebook and Youtube comments, and really, almost any comments section on any site.
The more that I read this stuff and try to see patterns, the more that one particular pattern emerges. Most of the messages seem to say that 1) the other person doesn’t care about you or 2) the other person is not smart/strong/capable of doing things. Overall, they seem to attack the humanity of other people.
I’ve thought over the years about what would be the best way to combat these messages. If said deliberately, people call them “disinformation”; if unintentionally, then probably “divisiveness.” I believe the best way to combat it is the remember the full humanity of the other person.
I like this strategy because it doesn’t require that I change the behavior of anyone else. The person who is shouting at me that Trump is a raving mad lunatic who is set to destroy the world…is a human being. So it Donald Trump. The conservative who says that Democrats are stuck in their ivory tower, book smart and street dumb, and are too out of touch with reality to comprehend what the normal person is going through…is a human being, and so are the Democrats.
Most attacks seem to go after our humanness—often dehumanizing by going up or down in strength (super villain or super hero vs weak thing or very powerful thing) or up or down in intention (godlike or demonlike, good vs evil, etc.).
I believe we combat this by recognizing that everyone is a human being. I don’t care if you’re black or white, tall or short, rich or poor, American or Chinese, young or old, or anything in-between—to me, you’re a human first and I want to bring more humanity back into our interactions.
Implicit to this statement is that not only are other people humans first, but I am a human first as well. No matter how good or evil, smart or dumb, strong or weak that I think I am, I am and will always be a homo sapien, a human being.
5:10PM
