I
have a disease. I am tired.
I
suffer from severe Internet exhaustion. I don’t mean to sound like an old
fogey, I don’t mean to be anti-progressive and I realize I’m part of the
generation that expanded the internet into the Leviathan it has become. But the
Internet is no longer a place for cute cat videos, sharing pictures with your grandma
or questionable and regrettable pornography surfing. The internet is a battle
ground, and every single one of us is on the frontlines. In fact, unlike any
other battlefront in history, there are ONLY frontlines. Allow me to explain.
Recently,
I made the mistake of downloading the Click2Houston, FoxNews, and CNN apps on
my phone. Now every time I look at the screen for a new notification, instead
of a funny comment or FB message, I receive news which reads a little like
this:
“Click2Houston: Woman shot in
southwest Houston, killer still at large. Is he coming straight for you?”
“CNN: England, Russia, France and
USA join in coalition to bomb the bejeesus out of (insert middle eastern
country name here).”
“FoxNews: Baby murdered in your
back yard and left there. Police wonder: did you do it?”
I
understand these may seem ridiculous and exaggerated, but they are only
slightly. All day, every day I am bombarded with this type of news, and it
gives me the suffocating feeling that this world is closing in around my
throat. So, I try to go to Facebook to get away from the horror in the news,
only to come across something even more vile: The Never-ending Dodgeball Game
of Political Polarization. I don’t even see a feed anymore, all I see is a
distinct and worn field, with progressives lined up on one side and
conservatives on the other, each hurling muddy balls as hard as they can from
either end of the field. No one is talking, there is no meeting in the middle
to discuss a cessation of fire. There is only the hurling and the snarling.
Generally these two aggressive teams are arguing whatever I just received a
notification about. Even though the news clearly only came through for the
first time two minutes ago, people already have an opinion. This seems strange
to me, and frankly makes me feel a little slow, which I am not used to.
How
could they have already formed an opinion? Do I have the wrong information? I
haven’t even been able to finish reading the article fully or researching other
news agencies and finding the most unbiased account of what really happened.
How can I have an opinion based on so little untrustworthy information?
It’s
simple. Those people are lined up on their side of the field and they look to
their “team” for what they should feel. Instead of looking inside, weighing
their own compassion, their personal experiences, their love for other humans
and their own countrymen, the desire to make America and the world better, the
consequences of their choices, and especially the validity of the information,
they choose whatever their side believes and go to the mattresses. Simply
because they have agreed with it in the past, they must agree with it now or
look like a fraud.
Imagine
that information is a spring. The source of the spring is crystal clear and
fresh, the information of those at ground zero. If we are to use the Paris
attacks as an example, the source is the mouths of the people at Bataclan,
those who stared down the barrel of the gun. They are the only ones who TRULY
know what happened in that room, no matter how many debriefings and TV
interviews they do. As you follow the stream, it first passes through the
rushing, frothing, rocky rapids of the first responders, police, medical
personnel, authorities on the ground, who are less concerned with the details
of information and their political implications, and more about saving lives.
As they should be. Then we pass through the sloshy bogs of media vultures,
swarming down on the scene like hungry, blind parasites, clutching to every bit
of gossip they can grasp in their groping hands and using it as a supposition.
The water grows murkier, yet the spring still carves its way forward, until it
hits the concrete dam of politicians. They filter and compress and bend the
stream to suit their needs and release it on the other side at 30% volume. So at this point we have probably 25% of the
original spring and the rest is murky, dirty, over processed information, which
then flows directly to a stagnant, putrid, mosquito infested retention pond,
called the internet from which we pick up the glass and drink freely.
It’s
from this diseased water that we form our opinions and tout them as fact backed
up by information that is a lot closer to fiction than to the original story.
Great
thinkers from the past would be very disappointed in us. We take fragments of
truth and make our proverbial mountains out of them. And what kills me is our
certainty. We are firm in our belief that whatever we’re saying is right, and
anyone who is against us will be defeated by the flood of internet articles we
can find that support our opinion. The truth is we’re just throwing dirty water
on each other and saying we’re clean. There are people who spend their entire
lives studying something and never know the full extent of the thing. People
like DaVinci, Einstein, Plato and Descartes will tell you that the more you
learn about anything, the more you realize you know so very little. In our
lifetime we can maybe become experts in one, if you’re lucky two areas. I could
study literature for the rest of my life, read a book every second I’m alive
and still not know the cannon. An astronomer could spend every second of their
life staring through a lens and making calculations and they will still only
know a minuscule fraction of the universe. But after reading the headlines and
a four paragraph article on the page of our news agency of choice, we are
unequivocal experts on that current event and nothing can dissuade us.
I
firmly believe the internet is making us stupid because it is taking away our
ability to discern truth from lie and fact from fiction. A perfect example of
this can be found in the most recent episode of South Park (who I follow like a
blind dog as my political compass) entitled “Sponsored Content.” They state
that people have lost the ability to tell the difference between news and ads.
I have to agree. Those who follow CNN, Fox, etc. do you know what part of the
news is being sponsored by what company? Do you know who is paying for the spin
on the information you are using as irrefutable fact? Because I don’t.
Now
that my feet are hurting up on this soap box, I will end with this. I am tired
of being placed in a category, of following the dirty stream of sludge thinking
I’m at Sandals on the lazy river. I’m cleaning my hands, I am getting informed,
and I am finding the truth from now on, no matter how hard it is to discover. I
don’t want to grandstand anymore for things other people believe in, I don’t
want to put others down for what they believe, and I don’t want to stand on a
crumbling foundation anymore trying to find my balance.
In
closing, fuck you Internet.
Fuck
you.
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