For centuries, humans have been hindered in their efforts to develop a critical sense of the world. Access to formal schooling was exclusive to the upper classes, ideologies were nothing more than one of Durkheim’s social facts — “external to the individual” –, and no one would dare to take into account the remarks of an uneducated somebody. Times, however, underwent continuous change. Modernity has gifted us with increasingly perfected means of communication and transportation. As one widely known politician, Moisés Naim, has once argued, this has begot an era of manifold sea changes: the more, the mobility, and the mentality revolutions. Now, we are better able to resist dogmatic authority, shun conservatism, and express our own takes on whatever we come into contact with.
There has been several instances where this diversity of perspectives has had positive outcomes. Without them, the civil society would not have first-hand knowledge of situations that have been neglected by the “big media”, such as American abuses at Guantánamo or the state of affairs in Syria (although this seems to be about to change). Without them, there would have been no Arab Spring, which freed — or, at least, tried to free — millions from the oppression of their own rulers. Without them, fearless challengers of the status quo like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden would not have exposed the unknown (or known and overlooked) illegal actions of governments and organisations. Equally, without them, most of the world population would have its mind steered by adamantine and unyielding opinion-makers.
It never ceases to amaze me, however, to notice the perils of this multitude of viewpoints. A common debate in social sciences refers to our ostensible incapacity to perceive a reality without being influenced by our personal experiences. As time goes by, this belief seems increasingly true. The argument goes: when one is born, one begins to develop their knowledge; this post-birth acquired information will then be used throughout their lives; hence the impossibility of neutrality. It is not up to me to declare the veracity or fallacy of this line of reasoning, but I call attention to the issues that derive from its apparent truthfulness.
A recent and controversial experiment conducted by researchers on Facebook has proved that the tenor of our social media posts changes according to the nature of other posts we see throughout the day. This way, for instance, if one is expressing their elation or dejection online, this happiness or sadness is likely to affect the posts of other people. While it is interesting to observe a world where the right to a voice is becoming trivial, this reverberation mechanism might lead to two daunting scenarios: (1) the outlook of the majority of people on life could not only hamper the standpoint of minorities (as described by Tocqueville), but also indirectly erode this unorthodox view; and (2) gigantic media outlets and think tanks, which still hold a substantial amount of power and influence (thus still shaping the minds of many individuals), could benefit from the diffusion of their ideas by ordinary people.
Therein lies the problem: if we were to assume as real the impossibility of humans being neutral, we would conclude that, in the end, people are not proclaiming self-made thoughts, but rather reproducing whatever pieces of information, imbued with ideology, they have seen before, irrespectively of their origins. The Internet epitomises this, as ideas on it spread so quickly that it is often hard to pinpoint their sources, and false rumours get so diffused that they become believable. On the other hand, differently from the paradigms that were established in the past, the current situation is even more worrying: our thoughts are not being brazenly prevented; actually, we have the impression that our opinion is unbiased and new, while it is clearly being influenced by our surroundings. And we assertively defend what we “think”, though it might just be a by-product of what the dominant news outlets and think-tanks say.
The implications of our supposed manner of dealing with the emergence of this multiperspective approach to worldly issues far outreach the scope of this essay. It remains to be seen whether the benefits of our new ways of expressing our opinions will outweigh its disadvantages or not. In any case, this discussion must be encouraged in a world ever more receptive to the notion of universal education and to the dismantling of the traditional hegemonic structures of informational power.
Originally published on thimabi.wordpress.com.