I’ve been thinking about my friend and colleague Dr. Les Kertay’s recent writings on radical civility. I also have shared Les’s frustration on our seeming inability to have a civil discourse when we disagree.
While I share many of Les’s opinions on this, and realize that much of what he says is the right thing to do, I find myself unable to practice much of it. My social media feeds are an echo chamber of people who share my opinions. Out of over a hundred friends on Facebook, I can count the conservatives on one hand, and probably still have fingers left. The quickest way to an unfriend or unfollow are to espouse a conservative opinion. And with the small group that remains, I still hide their political posts. Why is that?
I find many of my conservative friends opinions to be so egregious and poorly thought out as to be unbelievable. I’m sure they think the same of mine.
How did this come to be? We all have opinions, and we’re entitled to them. How did we come to be so divided in our opinions? Why can’t we discuss them?
Let’s talk about the nature of the division first. How did we become to be so divided? What happened to the middle ground?
There has been a distinct change in the media in the last 20 years. Objective, impartial journalism is dead. Many will tell you that it never existed, but there’s been a distinct swing since the founding of Fox News in 1996. Prior to that, news organizations tried to be objective. Many will argue they failed, but the attempt that was important. With the advent of Fox News and its distinct conservative slant, news organizations began to take a position and hold it. MSNBC holds a similar position on the liberal side. There are innumerable publications on both sides on the internet.
Simultaneous to the slanting of media outlets came the need and the ability to filter them. In the days of television and print media, your choices were limited, and you were as likely to be exposed to an opinion counter to your own as you were your own opinion. There wasn’t the ability to filter at a single-item level. Now, as news sources have multiplied on the internet, we’re unable to keep track, so we necessarily filter them. As these filters have become more advanced, we have the ability to create an echo chamber of our own beliefs – and we’re more likely to do so.
The simple nature of mainstream media also kills the middle ground. Combine the death of objectivity with the sensationalist nature of media, and you end up with only extreme opinions and issues getting voiced, without any of the nuance that fosters discourse. Any ground gained by the other side is presented as a sign of the end times.
A biased media is the enemy of fact. As a marketer, you can use the perception of fact to create a position. You use some facts and ignore others. You then present only those facts that support your position. So the echo chamber we create through filtering the mass amounts of information with which we’re presented lacks facts – or at least enough facts to form an alternate opinion.
We’re presented with limited facts, that the other side is the enemy, and the implications of their opinion are disastrous. To avoid the disaster, the limbic system of the brain takes over. The limbic system of our brain is the most primitive part. It doesn’t need thought nor fact. It’s virtually binary – fight or flee. Since we can’t flee, we fight.
That’s not the entire problem. Consider where communications are happening – social media.
There’s a great marketing concept called “noise in the channel.” Every promotion has a designed message that hopefully will be received by the intended audience via the chosen communication channel. However, every channel has limitations. These limitations may distort the message intended for the audience. This distortion is noise in the channel.
The more signals a communication channel can transmit, the less noise in the channel. An in-person meeting generally creates the least noise in the channel, because it transmits via the spoken word, visual signals, body language, and allows for real-time interaction. An email or text message has the most noise in the channel, because it only transmits one medium. Adding pictures or emojis to that text decreases the noise, but the possibilities for misinterpretation are greater than in-person communication.
Social media has a high noise-to-signal ratio because it transmits in limited media.
We have a huge number of biased media channels we can’t absorb, so we filter them into an echo chamber of our own beliefs. Those media channels tend to present extremes in a sensationalist manner that shows the other side as villains whose ideas will bring about the end of the world. We are presented with only those limited facts that support those beliefs. Because of sensationalism, the most primitive parts of our brain take over the discourse, and we communicate in media with a high noise-to-signal ratio.
This is why we’re divided, and we can’t talk about it civilly.
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