What I’m asking is if the pursuit of being intellectual has somewhat outpaced the ability to actually be intellectual. In a larger scale — could normal/intelligent people somewhat become exposed to group think without knowing.
The entire political discussion in this country has become somewhat of a news cycle with people waving in the wind.
I work at major university and we have performed an experiment to study how social media impacts national discourse — the results have been very interesting so far.
Anyone understand where I’m going with this?
Or have we become complacent with academia?
It might be the better question.
If the "pursuit of being intellectual has somewhat outpaced the ability to actually be intellectual" then we have no choice but to look at the means for where flaws may be, and it means slightly more than an evaluation of where social and information shortcuts are taken (i.e. the laziness of producing and consumption of information via social media.)
You could argue false expectation of information from social media as being sufficient to engage in political discussion is a huge flaw, I may counter with does that expectation also collide with purposeful conditioning of that expectation from these very large and successful business models into an attention span flaw.
To put it simpler, and perhaps harsher, does that "larger scale" even know the difference anymore?
Social media, amplified by the laziness of the medium, of course impacts national discourse and it may be hand in hand with corporatization of that news cycle. We already know we have a decreasing number of organizations with an increasing presence in delivery of the news, commentary, information, social media influencers, what have you.
Dumbed down information exchange drags down with any sense of political discourse, and more importantly those in politics using this to their own advantage. Probably speaks volumes as to how we become so polarized as a nation again. Our avenues of exchange are helping this now in a way unseen in US history.
Take a 30 second political ad seen on television. That same clip can spread across social media, with commentary and/or meme like statements, in seconds to millions... hundreds of millions... of useful idiots consuming such message as fact. It was always foolish to assume one clip would do the trick but doing this repeatedly has half the nation thinking Biden will turn us into Cuba and the other half thinking Trump will turn the nation into Nazi Germany.
I've referred to this often as "bumper sticker thinking," and what that really means is the distance between intellectualism and commonality from social media is that much greater.
Being intellectual has not outpaced the ability to actually be intellectual, our avenues of exchange have degraded discourse to the point becoming intellectual has fewer means and involves more effort than people care to apply.
