Ive learned a powerful lesson about social media today. Ive had quite a few discussions with people about the recent events in Ferguson, and I discovered that many opinions that at first I thought were petty or myopic were in fact perfectly reasonable positions to hold, given that youre getting all your news from cable TV. The fact is, critical analysis of deep political-social ills makes poor viewing. And yet, when I presented them information they never heard about, but Ive picked up via the internet (mostly Twitter), most recant. The lack of information from ironically uninformative 24-hour news is crippling the social debate. But the cure is to be more social. Reach out and connect with a diversity of sources, especially those that wouldt normally be found inside your friend or media bubble. Google News is good, Twitter and Reddit are even better. Some examples paraphrased from recent discussions: Why are those animals burning their own city to the ground?! Err, if you ignore the news anchor in front of a burning car and watch this streaming live feed, you can count the rioters. Destructive yes, but theyre a small fraction of the community. Why didnt they just hold calm protests outside City Hall/Ferguson PD? They did. Every day, for over 100 days. They even held protests at sports games, but the cameras refused to lay eyes on them. Follow em on FB/Twitter. What about those early days? I saw they needed the National Guard to keep peace! That was not the National Guard, at least for the first week. Local Riot Police were waving semi-automatic rifles at unarmed protesters and bearing down in tanks starting on the second night. That actually made the protests much bigger and angrier. Wait, what rifles/tanks? You dont know about the 1033 program, where the DOD just sells military gear to untrained police? Congress has been holding hearings on it... oh thats right, nobody watches CSPAN. Neither do I, but maybe lets compromise on Vox? Look, the grand jury found Wilson not guilty! Umm, do you know how a grand jury works? This is just one kid. You dont see this kind of fuss for white kids shot by cops! This is not just one kid. This is approximately 400 kids every year. We dont know exact numbers because police record keeping is, well, incomplete. But even incomplete analysis shows that for every one dead white kid who doesnt get media attention, theres between 1 and 10 dead black kids, even though whites outnumber blacks about 6 to 1.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 03:19:21 +0000
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