I think social media is a fantastic revolution in human connectivity. But I also have a fear that it has played a large part in bringing us to the current status quo.
I'm not normally one to broadcast strong political beliefs, but it would hardly be a surprise if you've ever read my writing that I am very liberal in my outlook. I was anti-brexit, and pro-Obama.
I don't understand the benefit of isolationist thinking, of withdrawing from a world where one life is no more important than another, of clinging to outdated concepts of cultural identity where your pride stems solely from the utterly random action of being born in a particular country.
I don't understand rejecting a healthcare system that ensures your fellow countrymen, your fellow human beings, are treated with dignity and respect and not forced into extreme debt because they had the bad luck of ill-health.
Therefore I, like many others, struggle to comprehend the recent political results in the UK and USA, which seem to fly in the face of the more accepting, progressive global society, which at one point seemed inevitable with the internet breaking down borders.
But perhaps it has achieved the opposite.
It is easy to be baffled by a result that bears no relation to your own worldview because we can all state with ease "everyone I know agrees with me," because as a rule that is the case. Sure there may be a few exceptions, but our friends and close relations will usually share our beliefs, this why we keep them within our social circle, and so our perspective is clouded by this inevitable segregation.
Before social media, the chances of the most extreme beliefs being validated were slim, because you could only truly discuss your political or religious views with a limited audience, and you were just as likely to come across opposition as agreement when broadcasting your opinion.
With social media you have two huge factors that help extreme views propagate, a degree of anonymity, and the ability to find a large enough number of people who agree and thus validate your views.
Discussions, arguments, disputes, trash-talking; all of these are popular past-times online, and with the benefit of distance, and the lack of physical presence people do seem to lose any sense of propriety, with debates easily descending into the kind of futile name calling and bad-mouthing that seemed to typify the average presidential debate last year. Neither person came off well in those debates, and it is sad to see potential world leaders unable to rise above such small-minded name-slanging.
And whereas before you were more likely to come across a voice of dissent against your view, now you can easily find thousands of people who think the same way. The more people who seem to concur, the braver you become in speaking these views.
Which leads to a third, and more dangerous problem; the dissemination of inaccurate or downright false information.
We now live in an era when the news use Twitter feeds in their reports. Twitter is essentially a messaging service, a way of broadcasting a thought. At first it seemed like it could breakthrough the borders of media blackouts and present us with on-the-street reportage from unaffiliated citizens. But then there came the realisation that tweets, and to the same degree, shared Facebook content, could simply be an unfiltered, and actually completely wrong opinion of a situation.
Which leads us to a US president who tweets false and inaccurate information, sometimes sourced directly from Twitter, to a hugely receptive audience.
Where unfiltered opinion should reflect freedom of speech, and unedited reportage, it instead has permitted total crap to get spread far and wide, to the point that it becomes the so-called alternative facts. The old argument that if enough people believe it must mean it is true is what social media is all too easily able to spread.
And because we stick within the social circles that concur with our general beliefs, we continue to do so at this grander, global scale, which only serves to highlight the split in thinking. Tweeting your outrage at Trump or Blair or whoever, only helps to validate to the opposition that you are irrational and blinded by your own opinion.
It's not to say this rift between left and right never existed before social media; clearly it did. I just fear the ease of sharing extremist thinking, from both sides, has fuelled the fire of conflict.
History is also full of extreme views gaining traction to a devastating conclusion, but previously these have been born from poverty, from military intervention, and situations that were already at breaking point. What has happened in the UK and USA, where there were undoubtedly problems, but where comparative to many countries, we are still financially comfortable with a high standard of living, seems to have been a reaction to public perception, rather than reality.
The fear of terrorism is greater now, than when the IRA were active. Why is that? We have long had immigration, from countries we ourselves once conquered, from the EU, from countries torn apart by war, so why now do we suddenly feel the need to curb this? What evidence is there that by isolating yourself from the rest of the world you will prosper? If that is the case, why is history littered with explorers seeking out new connections and new trade routes?
Do you know the one industry that is truly unified globally? This isn't my opinion by the way, this is something I saw on a BBC documentary. Is the BBC impartial? I don't know, because I don't work there, and I don't watch their news, or read their website. But that is not relevant, because the documentary was about the airline industry, and was simply an account of how the industry operates. There is no logical way to read a political motive in this documentary being factually inaccurate. I also have a brother-in-law who works in the aviation industry, who has worked all over the world, who can validate the facts from a ground-level perspective.
Back to my original question, what is the one industry that is truly unified globally? That answer has been revealed in the nature of the documentary above; aviation. To enable carriers to traverse the world, the whole system has to be the same the world over. The language of aviation is universal. The health and safety standards are universal. If you experience a medical emergency on any airline, anywhere in the world, the crew call one single contact centre based in the USA.
The airline industry is proof that when the need arises we can create a totally global, unified approach. Air travel is the safest method of travel, with a million people in the sky at any given time. A million people from pretty much every country in the world potentially in the sky at any point, all trusting a system that successfully transports them to pretty much any country in the world.
It doesn't matter who your fellow passengers are. They will be from all walks of life, with all sorts of opinions that may or may not differ from yours. Yet from the moment they arrive in their departing airport, they are treated in the same way (let's exclude the fact you can pay more for a first/business class service, that's just a case of financial differences, not cultural), and have the same basic experience until they exit their destination airport.
We CAN come to a consensus as a human race when we really have an incentive. The internet and social media should allow this, if only we can think of the website we are using as an airport where we must respect the rules and our fellow travellers.
After all, we are all travellers on this rock we call Earth.
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