Why the Facebook News feed is what's wrong with America

Jon Stewart was a master at criticizing a now obsolete delivery system for news. When he took to the Daily Show in the nineties, cable news was the fountainhead from which most peoples' perception of current events sprung. He did a masterful job in highlighting how the 24 hour news cycle thrived on making us dumber, which in turn explained why Americans were so susceptible to manipulation by politicians, corporations, religion, et. al.

His departure from The Daily Show was duly mourned, and I doubt we'll see another like him. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Because cable news' time has passed. It's still where we turn to hear about big events - mass shootings, political conventions, and other tire fires - but not where the meat of our understanding-or lackthereof- comes from. That would be the internet - a jungle of facts, figures and opinions from which we can choose which narrative we wish to believe, then disseminate it among an imagined network of "friends" through social media.

If Cable News was a tabloid magazine - a glamorized, exaggerated vision of real life, overselling drama at the expense of context (or credibility). The internet is a "choose your own adventure" novel. That cable news, and the various other instruments of media manipulation have dumbed down our expectations for current events does not improve things.

"Truthiness" is the word Stephen Colbert coined to describe the intellectual dry rot that had settled into American media by the mid 2000s - that is, how we give something that feels true equal consideration to something that is true. You don't need technical psycho-mumbo-jumbo to understand this concept, just click on any polarizing "trending" topic on Facebook and read the headlines of articles people are linking to.

Generally it looks like this: Person A, writes a few words about how they feel, then link to an article which supports that feeling. Something like these:

Both of those articles are bullshit. This is something that has to be recognized, whether you agree with the feeling that caused them or not.

Republicans who threatened to boycott Bradley Cooper's movies after he appeared at the DNC did not do so because they "can't tell the difference between movies and real life". Such a person would be certifiably mentally incompetent. They did it because 1) they learned Bradley Cooper has a different political orientation than they do, and 2) This is particularly egregious because he achieved the greatest financial and critical success of his career by playing staunch republican Chris Kyle in American Sniper. Whether you agree with these people or not, is up for debate, but first we have to be debating actual people, not a cartoon caricature drawn up by a Huffington Post that tries to maximize clicks by being witty. The news is not witty. An editorial can be witty. And an editorial absolutely cannot be confused with news if you want to be a functioning, intelligent contributor to society.

On the other side, a contributor to The Hill claims Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier who gave a moving anti-Trump speech at the DNC, was "tricked" into his appearance. The suggestion that this educated man somehow he didn't realize his grief would be politicized at a political convention is absurd, condescending and ridiculous. It's an argument that can only be made by someone who is just about to realize they are out of logical arguments, and must invent things to justify their gut feeling.  Since Khan was sympathetic, eloquent, and morally unimpeachable, they cannot posit that anything he said was wrong, so they attack Hillary Clinton for using him for the wrong reasons.

In either case it's clear that the authors of such pieces were less interested in informing the public about current events than reassuring people of their gut feelings. The problem with this is that everyone who doesn't already agree them feels misunderstood, mocked and angry.

Imagine going into a store, where the salesperson says to you: "That dress makes you look fat. Buy this - it's more slimming." That person does not make the sale. No matter how accurate their summation of your appearance, most people will refuse to listen to a person who insults them. And thus does the country become more divided.

The reality is that we aren't helping. Ideology, and politics are salesmanship. You are trying to get someone to "buy" your opinion - be it that progress necessitates racial equality, or that racial equality is a threat to national security. Insulting the customer rarely helps.

Though I could sincerely point out that Khizr Khan was not "used" or "tricked" by the Democratic party - no Muslim has to be tricked into disliking Donald Trump, particularly not a grieving parent who feels his son's memory is insulted by the candidate - any more than anyone else who stumps at a political convention, I would rather criticize my people for taking their eyes off the ball. I can't fully grasp the ugliness that has led to Donald Trump's candidacy, but would like to. Depicting his supporters as a rash of idiots feeds their distrust of the "main stream media", such that people feel that news items which don't support their beliefs are hiding something from them. And the internet is always there to offer a comforting assurance that they were right.

See Trump never kicked a baby out of his rally! The lefties who read the articles on Huffpo or Rolling Stone or wherever else that incorrectly cited that he did probably know this. "He didn't kick the mother out, he was just a jerk to her.". "He was definitely joking when he said 'get the baby out of here', but his mocking the mother for believing he liked it was sincere'.". It doesn't show he hates babies, it shows he's an asshole.

This is eerily similar to the way Trump supporters explain some of his more incendiary proclamations as "sarcasm".  News, like a presidential candidate, is supposed to tell you what actually happened, but we no longer expect it to. On social media, at least, it is a tool for asserting our rightness, for affirming our beliefs by highlighting the multitudes who share them. Not for learning. Not for questioning.

Thus, many now claim as "news" any article supporting their already held beliefs, and are living in a completely different world from their neighbors. The problem is that you can't determine whether your beliefs are right or wrong without thoughtful debate, but who can debate when the facts themselves cannot even be agreed upon.

I'm a liberal, but if the left is more determined to be smug than useful, they are part of the problem. And both sides exist in their own bubble, obstinately refusing to recognize the other side as made up of thinking human beings . On the left I blame vanity, on the right I blame fear and insecurity. But either way, nobody's helping.

How Donald Trump became the voice of my generation:

That the internet has radically transformed society is generally accepted with a sense of bemused attachment: it used to take hours or days to send someone a message which today can be accomplished in the blink of an eye.  You had to get your news from the Godheads on TV, or the editors of a daily newspaper. Now everyone is an editor, everyone is a receiver and transmitter of the latest trends.

Where people are quick to realise that the internet has changed the way we live, fewer people acknowledge that it has actually changed us. In this day and age, there is no more news. Only editorials, delivered by average Joes who feel compelled to own current events by commenting on them, folding them into a meme which they can share, a borrowed online identity.

What really matters is I'm witty and I like dogs.

How often do you see a tweet with a simple statement of fact: "There is so much lead in Flint's water the mayor has declared a state of emergency", versus a statement of opinion: "So tragic what's happening in Flint right now."

The right or wrong opinion isn't the issue. The issue is that facts have been superseded by opinions. which have become the currency of modern life. Because you can't own a fact in the way that you can own a quip.

Remember this next time you try to diffuse a Trump supporter by explaining that forcing South Korea to pay for America's military presence there will cause the U.S.A. to lose its strategic influence in Asia. This is a language that's going extinct. Where once upon a time, people watched the news to keep informed, and discussed it around the water cooler, my generation looks to the news as an accessory to our online profiles.

The November attacks in Paris weren't an example of 20th century foreign policy disasters in the Middle East coming home to roost. Nor were they an exemplar of why terrorism is the weapon of choice for militants who don't have the resources to fight an open battle (scaring your enemies into expending their own resources to prevent small scale attacks is far more cost effective). It was a chance for us to add a red, white and blue filter to our Profile picture - as a statement of solidarity with the French people, but also a reminder that we are Very. Passionate. About. World. Events. People., #BlackLivesMatter.

Today, news only has value insofar as it can be co-opted into our online identity. We are ever on the lookout for something to enrage us, to inspire us, to promote us. The thing that media has now more than ever has before is that very thing: "us". Social Media isn't about facts. It's about identities.

Psychologists among you know what happens when "facts" and "identities" intermingle. It's called cognitive dissonance and it's a motherfucker.

The old top-down method of information had its share of problems - mainly that the person who owns the network/newspaper effectively owned the flow of information, and had it in them to misrepresent people or events in an arena where they couldn't be challenged. But the benefit was that the people doing the reporting were expected to know what they were talking about, and voters made decisions based on generally agreed upon events.

People on either side of the debate decry the "slant" in the media's depiction of their demagogues, but fail to acknowledge that their outcry itself is an act of slant. Donald Trump surely would not have gotten the media coverage he had in the primaries if the networks weren't keenly aware of how eager viewers were to get angry. More qualified candidates like Chris Christie wouldn't have had to elbow in for airtime.

Donald Trump's signature characteristic is his narcissism, which makes him the perfect candidate for our age. To clarify: to be narcissistic is not to be conceited, though people often use those expressions as if they are interchangeable. A person who's conceited thinks they're better than you, assumes you also think this, and acts accordingly. These people are assholes.

A narcissist, on the other hand, is mentally ill. Though they can appear conceited, the main divider between narcissists and the rest of us is that they don't perceive a boundary between themselves and their surroundings.

"We are the world" is the quintessential summation of what makes narcissists different from healthy human beings, and it's also the reason they can be so charming. Narcissists may appear at first to be deeply caring, open people, willing to do anything to help their fellow man - because their fellow man is, in their mind, just an extension of themselves.

This becomes a problem when your fellow man's interests diverge with your own. And it becomes disastrous when a person with such a twisted view of reality is empowered to control situations that have confounded better minds for decades in their complexity. For the narcissist, everything is about them.  If Mexicans are coming into America, it's because they want to steal your job and rape your sister, not because they're running away from violence or deep-seated economic issues in their own country.

South Korea is benefitting from American Military presence in their country, therefore they should pay for it. Forget that American presence there protects our interests in a continent which otherwise would be ceded completely to Chinese and Russian influence. Any solution that doesn't centre around the narcissist's vision of themselves as the centre of the universe will not be considered.

That Donald Trump is utterly unfit for office is understood by a great many pundits and protestors, who continue to shake their heads in wonderment at how he got this far. But actually, he is the perfect candidate for our times. Social Media has primed the pump for a Trump presidency better than the Donald himself ever could. Ten years ago, the ascension of this man, based on his current method of campaigning, would be as unthinkable as photographing food and expecting your friends to look at it.

But here we are.

I've heard a lot of talk about how my generation is the feeling generation, since we are so interconnected and care so deeply about social causes. But what does caring really look like for a narcissist?

It looks a bit like our response to Kony 2012. You may recall a video highlighting a human rights travesty in Uganda got a hundred million views on YouTube, was shared by celebrities like Rihanna and Justin Beiber, then disseminated through a deeply concerned, justifiably outraged populace. We all hugged ourselves: see how social media is making the world a better place?

And then nothing. We all moved on. It became clear to anyone still watching that the outpouring of support was actually a pose. That "awareness" was abundant, but action nearly nonexistent. The followup video has less than three million views. The human tragedy was not a call to arms, but an accessory to be mounted on our twitter feed like a charm on a pandora bracelet: Look at me, I'm a person who cares.

This is a fundamentally narcissistic way of seeing the world. A conceited person believes others want to see every detail play out in their daily life via social media. Only a narcissist views major world events primarily as a vessel for them to express their identity.

Were the 2015 Paris attacks the result of a medieval, backward religion trying to encroach on modern values? Or was it a century of poor foreign policy decisions come home to roost? Neither. It was a red, white and blue filter to put on your profile photo, just so everyone knew how "with it" you were.

In this context, the rise of Donald Trump should not be surprising. The bragging, the over sharing, the constant quest for validation, the belief that freedom to express an opinion is more important than the facts underlying that position, is so quintessentially millennial, its no surprise that these things haven't disqualified him from the race.

Combine that with twenty years of poor decision making by those in power - from deregulating Wall Street to destabilizing the Middle East with the Iraq war, leading to mass anger and confusion, and Donald Trump makes perfect sense as a candidate in keeping with our slanted, angry, narcissistic new world order.

I do not mean this to sound reassuring.

From the pundits attempting to weigh in on how this could happen, to the liberals staring in disbelief, people, are still acting on the assumption that we live in the same world they grew up in, but that's a lie. The old rule book cannot be used to dictate a new way of life, thus its been allowed to mutate into something far beyond their control.

Most liberals acknowledge this problem's existence on the right: the rallying cry to "Make America Great Again" presupposes that it was ever great for anyone other than white males, and (more stupidly) that we can turn back the clock on globalization.

But those who fail to acknowledge how social media has affected their perception of events, their impetus to put their own personal stamp on issues that are often beyond their understanding are equally to blame. For this is the climate that Donald Trump needed to thrive, and after ten years of facebook and its ilk we've been conditioned to treat him as legitimate.

For context:

Automatic weapons gave birth to the twentieth century, surely as the internet gave birth to the 21st. Though alarmists like to draw comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, the better analogue to Donald Trump and the many other ways the world seems to be coming apart at the seams is World War I. Though the ascendance of Donald Trump hopefully won't kill millions of people or precipitate a sequel that's even more destructive, it was predicated by major technological and social change, combined with an inability to adapt to globalization.

By the end of World War I, survivors were scratching their heads, at a loss to explain what the hell had just happened. WWII gets more attention - mostly because it was fought by such colourful characters, and its cause is easier to understand. WWI was, technically, precipitated by the murder of an archduke in Serbia - a man whose importance in life was far out of proportion to the titanic fallout of his death. Take a step back and there were other things - arms races, nationalism,  treaty networks dictating that if one nation goes to fight, three more go with her, and the deeply first world problem that Europe really hadn't had a good war in ages. These things could converge to cause a war, but not the Great War. A World War became the Great War thanks to new technology used in the service of old ideas.

That is: wars are fought in battles where two sides agree to meet, one side does most of the dying and the other is the victor. Usually done at the whim of a monarch with little to no connection to the suffering of his people. You've seen it in a hundred movies where opposing forces meet across a battlefield like so many Sharks and Jets.

And now they had machine guns! Imagine the possibilities.  No more firing one shot, then taking five minutes to load another. Twenty rounds a second! They were certain the war would be over in a month. The reality is that when technology causes major social change, you adapt to it, not the other round.

In this case, both sides had machine guns, so the best you could do was dig holes across from one another and hide inside. At some point, a few men would go over the top. Most of them would die. And if we're lucky we gained ten metres. This is what happens when new technology is incorporated into old institutions without appreciating how fully it has altered the rules.

And as America blunders itself toward a Trump presidency, it's hard not to see the connection between this time and that. The world at large is still reeling - financially and culturally- from the effects of globalization, and the economic collapse, and while some Americans mourn their losses with a cry to Make America Great Again, we have overlooked the fact that technology, specifically, social media, has changed not only the world we live in, but us ourselves.

And now....gun control?

When 27 people were murdered - most of them children - at Sandy Hook elementary, the United States seemed ready to take a good look at itself and declare, for once and all, that military grade automatic weapons should not be in the hands of the mentally ill, and that the best way to guarantee that was by restricting the sale of automatic weapons, increasing background checks, etc...

94% of Americans polled supported gun reform in 2013, but the bill failed to pass. We can save the question of whether or not this still counts as a democracy when a bill supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans fails to make it through congress for another time.

The prevailing wisdom is that this is just another rotation of the wheel. There will be the standard outpouring of grief, then outrage, followed by a long silence and no change.

Probably. But maybe not. Maybe this time is different. Because it plays on attitude even more American than complacency: bigotry.

It would be very nice if we could, once again, explain the statistics to these people - the fact that the person most likely to be killed by a gun is its owner, or that hardly any of them have the tactical awareness to use a weapon effectively in a high stress situation. But by now we should have learned that the high road is helpless. If not, may I remind you who the presumptive Republican nominee for president is?

Its not enough to expect unreasonable people to listen to reason. The thrust of change has to be to be co-opted by their baked-in prejudice.

In which case, we might have hit the jackpot - not that a mass murder like this is ever anything but a tragedy - but we're in luck that this time it was comitted by a member of a feared minority group (that is, feared by the sort of person who thinks citizens will need AK-47s to defend themselves against a tyrannical government in the near future).

Make no mistake. If the tragedy at Orlando hadn't happened, another would still be coming around the bend. It would (will) be awful. Liberals will throw up their hands in frustration, the NRA will stress the need to arm citizens, and nothing will change.

That's if the shooter is white, of course. The NRA, and Joe the Plumber aren't afraid enough of white people for any of our previous mass shootings to provoke major change, even if they should be*. But they are afraid of ISIS, and - more broadly - Muslims in general.

Now that the anti-gun movement can be framed as anti-minority, it might gain more traction. If you find that hard to believe, imagine a large group of urban blacks shows up to an NRA rally, pointing out that the vast majority of Americans prosecuted for gun possession are black, and that the few remaining restrictions are merely institutionalised racism. Those same, mostly white folks would backpedal so hard - stressing that restrictions are good and keep us safe, because we need to know who is buying this arsenal - and how dare you for mentioning racism, ever.

Now that the anti-gun movement can dovetail with anti-Muslim sentiment. We are fools if we pretend that that bigotry doesn't exist, or that it can be reasoned with - once again, recall the presumptive Republican nominee - it might be the only way to get through to the sort of person who thinks average citizens have a right to automatic weapons. Instead of keeping military grade arsenal away from Americans, we'll be keeping them from terrorists! The fact that every mass shooter - regardless of his skin color - has proven to be above these peoples' grasp.

Finally - for all the wrong reasons - gun control in America just got a boost.

*Have you ever noticed that we are always informed that a white shooter is "mentally ill", whereas with minorities that information is presumed to be redundant?