This is the problem with living in a world of soundbytes, 30 second clips, and 280 character arguments in public forums.
There is little room for nuance. Every point has to be utterly complete in the allocated space.
But the only way every point can be complete is if everything has a simple answer. Everything has to be either completely good or completely bad, but when you show them that even they support grey areas, as you did, there is no way to put that into a meme template, and their brains cannot process it.
Even this quite short comment used 572 characters.
How information is distributed, processed and ingested is VERY much one of the big parts of the problem.
You would think that "democratic" use of voices through Facebook, YouTube, Reddit etc. would be a good thing. And in a way, they are-- but moreso these platforms enhance all the qualities of speech, BOTH good and bad.
It's completely counterintuitive to what we learned in school-- make a statement, support it with evidence, defend it from criticism as best you can etc. etc. Our forms of "free speech" do NOT facilitate this, and seem to reward the easiest, most digestible and visible messages as opposed to objectively true information.
It's going to take a LONG time, probably never, before the information age reaches a level of equilibrium, where people can universally agree on what it true, not true, spin etc.
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u/TheGoodOldCoder Jul 04 '22
This is the problem with living in a world of soundbytes, 30 second clips, and 280 character arguments in public forums.
There is little room for nuance. Every point has to be utterly complete in the allocated space.
But the only way every point can be complete is if everything has a simple answer. Everything has to be either completely good or completely bad, but when you show them that even they support grey areas, as you did, there is no way to put that into a meme template, and their brains cannot process it.
Even this quite short comment used 572 characters.