Ambivalence and Experience

I feel more and more ambivalent about opinions in Facebook – well actually almost all social media – because of this specific misconception:

“Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that ‘everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.’ And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.”
–Tom Nichols (The Death of Expertise)

There are a lot of things wrong in this world, among the worst is the voice that carries and and presents inexperienced, uneducated, uninformed, and/or misinformed opinion as fact. Not only does it saturate social media, but it has begun rearing its ugly head in the workplace…where the more experienced and/or knowledgeable voice is drowned in the sea of people basing their comments, opinions, and knowledge on 5 minutes of internet searches.

This is what unlimited access to information has become: The ability to rely on unvetted conclusions and winging it when the shit doesn’t work. You have only to read the first few posts in your facebook feed to get an example. People have neither the ambition nor need to invest themselves in an issue, ergo they rely on the scope of their internet searches. This is awesome is your looking for solid ways to get the stain out of a favorite shirt…but hardly the evidence necessary to substantiate a decision in the hiring process or voting…yet we’re doing this every $#%#ing¹ day.The really sad part is we’re all guilty of it. It’s almost impossible to avoid ingesting some party’s rhetoric or agenda while checking out your friends awesome baby pictures. A few days into it and you now, without having researched or read any documentation, proof, or report, exactly how many people carry a gun, got killed last year by guns, and most importantly, how important people feet it is to contribute rhetoric on the color of a !@#$ing coffee cup.

This is who we are now: a great big society chuck full of people too preoccupied with themselves to invest in knowing what the !@#$ they are talking about. Ugh.

-T