Great piece about how online cowboys and keyboard warriors are affecting the discourse of healthy critical thinking. Here are two passages worth reading: 1) The best analogy to use here is that of playing chess with a pigeon. It will clumsily knock over the pieces, take a crap on the board, then fly back to its friends to brag about how it won the match. The internet is overrun with pigeons. It becomes almost impossible to find a good chess game in today’s climate because the critical thinkers are too busy cleaning up all of the poop left on their proverbial chess boards. Sometimes, they even give up and join the massive pigeon population themselves. 2) Oftentimes those voices create noise that distracts people from the true issues at hand. In the online version of kangaroo court, otherwise known as social media, seemingly every viral phenomenon or human interest story is quickly and harshly judged by the masses. Simultaneously, strangers will attack other strangers with drive-by insults and not-so-clever memes to argue their points. And after the vitriol is spilled and the social media shares/retweets dissipate, the angry mob forgets all about it and moves on to the next shiny object trending in the newsfeed. No lessons are learned, very little thoughtful dialogue occurs, and the cycle continues.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 02:14:56 +0000
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