Fulfilling potential
The windmills of the mind Geran Jones warns that on social media what goes round comes round It is clear that when passions dominate the mind, these can torment people and prevent them from living in harmony, as Spinoza observed. These past two years and more, the country seems to have been living in a parallel world, one in which reality appears to have been sidelined by quixotic behaviour. It is not only that the referendum has fissured the country and that the failure of political leadership has led to a constitutional crisis. What is also deeply worrying is the cancer of the irrational, the outrageous and the counter-factual which has come to exercise a pernicious influence on vectors of information and on people’s way of thinking. In search of an explanation to establish why centuries of rational discussion and British pragmatism have been summarily jettisoned, commentators point to the effects of globalisation. The economic benefits of a shrinking world are broadly welcomed, but the social and cultural changes have given a rise to identity discourse. These processes have farreaching effects on identity formation on the individual level,
as well as to the new forms that liberal ideas on individualism have acquired in the modern age. This state of affairs has, in part, been promoted through two contradictory features of social media platforms: the centrifugal effect of enabling individual comment to reach a global audience via internet is in tension with the centripetal effect of the uniformisation of messaging through channelled ‘likes’, re-tweeting and forwarding, underpinned by commercial considerations. We live in a world of excess information which leaves us feeling overwhelmed. The consequence of round the clock news feeds and 24-hour messaging is boredom - or a numbness - for reality, and an acceptance of, and preference for, emotional rhetoric. This, in turn, has led to a sudden growth of interest in fake news and conspiracy theories, re-tweeted far more often than real news. Walter Benjamin was concerned that as information spread ever more quickly and further, the deeper became the perplexity of living. There is not simply an indifference to truth or facts. Honesty and Truth have been
Autumn 2019
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