Posts Tagged ‘ray rice’
Think for Yourself
The world is filled with stories for which we are awash in what someone else thinks about the story. Not so much about what they think about the facts of the story. No, that would be too reasonable, and take altogether to much time and effort. It’s all about making a story fit the world view of the commentator, about coming to a conclusion often before the story itself has come to a conclusion.
Our various information highways are jammed with “drivers” who are jumping to a conclusion, with all of the dangers inherent in that. Benghazi, Ray Rice, Ferguson, Bay Village. Each of these (and others you can think of) is, or will be soon, shorthand for a class of stories in which the signature characteristic was a jump to conclusion by large groups of people holding opposing world views who sought to use the story as a gavel to be pounded upon their own personal pulpit. I offer here no opinions whatsoever on the facts of any of these particular stories, only the observation that in each of them the rush to opine on the greater societal/political meaning they might involve was in itself harmful.
You could offer that these examples are indicative only of our new “gotta know”, always on news demand/deluge brought about by the info firehose of the internet. You could expand that by saying that these stories and the societal firestorm they’ve lit could only have happened in this new age in which everyone has a pulpit, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or a blog. To this I would reply that the internet and the amplifiers that ride along its rails are simply that: accelerants rather than fire starters. The issue is prematurely jumping to a conclusion for the simple reason that your conclusion confers some personal benefit to you, the jumper, regardless of the validity of your conclusion once the fire is naught but the cool embers of the facts remain.
This is not new. This is not a function of 100 or 1000 channel cable news or the internet. A million bloggers vs. a hundred columnists, Twitter vs. letters to the editor. Drew Carey’s opinion and his money. None of those. This is about waiting for the whole story to unwind and for the cold hard reality of the facts to lay bare before you, rather than parsing the meaning of one of these events through the prism of an ideologue who has a size 12 to bang, or someone famous who has an opinion, or needs some buzz. It may be “new” if we consider the timeframe of papyrus vs printing press, but that’s as new as it gets.
Proof? Tawana Brawley.
Too young to know who that is? Too old to remember the story and the associated firestorm? Google/Bing/Ask.com it (those really ARE new). It’s a tale of people with ulterior motives who took control of a story that could be twisted to fit their worldview and their agenda without regard for either the truth or the effect of their machinations on the real lives of the real people who’d actually lived the real story. All in the “archaic” age of newspapers, network news, and the infancy of talk radio. Read about it; you won’t find it unfamiliar at all.
There are two lessons here, one that enrages and one that educates. There are never any consequences for those who use supposition and spin a tale that promotes their world view, often for personal gain. Indeed, you will find eerily familiar names in the news ca. 1989 as in the news ca. 2014. The actionable lesson predates papyrus and is so oft told it would be trite were it not so often ignored, if ever learned: arrive at a conclusion when, and only when, you have real facts at your disposal.
Then think for yourself.