I find social media to be extremely educational.

 I find social media to be extremely educational.  Millions of people sharing their innermost thoughts with the world in an increasingly carefully curated medium.  Each social media channel is dominated by “influencers” that generally reflect one side or the other of the national argument that passes for social discourse.  The level of intelligence embodied in the content on both left and right is abysmal and the degree to which contrarian voices are silenced is astounding.  “Free speech” is but one of the casualties.  Equally important is the dumbing down of America and the growth of mob mentalities.  Not only do we not think issues through, we do not even articulate our own disagreement with our neighbor, preferring instead to copy a meme generated by a lonely soul living in their parent’s basement or a more sophisticated political operative busily supporting one or another cause.

I am increasingly fascinated by the subtle nature and growing effectiveness of the control mechanisms governing social media and the extent to which the public participates in enforcing political bias.  Social media channels rely not only on artificial intelligence, but, to a great extent, also on the public, to identify contrarian views.  Their response is not to argue points of disagreement, but rather to silence opposition voices.  The vast majority of the populace today, ducks their heads and tunes in to the social media channel that best represents their own”thinking.”  Perfectly nice people post obnoxious material that illustrates their own shallowness, and they do it with great glee.  When challenged on this point, they respond with anger and childish rebuttal.  Never are issues intelligently debated in social media channels.  The public reaction is to blame the social media channel, but, in my mind, the real culprits are you and me for engaging in this childish stupidity.

The extent to which this phenomenon is impacting our society never ceases to amaze and discourage me.  I am an ardent photographer and I believe that beauty in nature can be an antidote to social malaise.  I try to share my photography as widely as possible, asking nothing in return.  I am proud to say that my photography is favorably regarded by most, but, very recently, I have been asked to not share it on certain social media channels, because it was not representative of the geographic limits associated with that particular channel.  I confess that my critics did indeed grasp one of my objectives and that was to try to broaden the geographic confines of our thinking.  As I see it “us” and “them” is a very serious fault line in our society.  If people living a few miles apart choose to draw imaginary lines that separate them from each other, how, in the world, can people living on opposite sides of the planet avoid conflict?

I confess that I find all of this very discouraging.  We are constantly bemoaning the evil nature of “them” without understanding that you and I are not only "us", but are also, actually “them.”  I well understand that we can not admit that and conclude that we are hell bent on destroying ourselves without accepting that deep down inside we understand it.  We focus instead on subjects that we can get our inadequate minds around:  the age of the fetus, the price of gasoline, the sign on the bathroom door, our precious feelings, and the boundaries around our community.  The Brat and The Donald are not what is going to destroy us.  We will do that ourselves by walling ourselves off from each other and repeating whatever stupidity, our “leaders” script for us.