Social Media: Making Us Dumber?
It&#x27;s become vogue to talk about social media in this manner but the problem is much more generalized.  Sensationalist news from mainstream&#x2F;traditional media outlets does exactly the same thing.  And the sensitivity around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and so on, is destroying our ability to engage in civil discourse with one another - not just on social media, but even in our classrooms.<p>Here&#x27;s an example of what I mean.  A couple of days ago I was in a waiting room somewhere and as a result ended up watching a few TV news headlines.  Some teacher in Wisconsin assigned her fourth-graders some homework that asked them to provide &quot;3 &#x27;good&#x27; reasons for slavery and 3 bad reasons&quot;, which sparked a predictable uproar:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.ca&#x2F;entry&#x2F;school-homework-good-reasons-slavery_us_5a566d6be4b08a1f624af02f" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.ca&#x2F;entry&#x2F;school-homework-good-reas...</a><p>Unsurprisingly, no one was willing to go on the record to try and defend or even explain the assignment.  It&#x27;s toxic.  And yet, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s racist to try and parse the teacher&#x27;s intention here (or just ask for a comment from them!)  The teacher put &quot;good&quot; in quotes, which is a good clue, and I can certainly come up with &quot;good&quot; (in quotes) reasons for slavery (e.g. cotton-picking is highly labour intensive and there was tremendous demand for raw cotton by the rapidly industrializing cotton industry in England).<p>That&#x27;s a far cry from an assignment that says, &quot;provide a persuasive moral basis for the goodness of slavery&quot;.  But apparently we can&#x27;t have conversations like this in our society any more, because there&#x27;s no room for nuance.<p>As a nerd, like many of you, I like having intellectual conversations with plenty of nuance, in which one gives the people around you plenty of leeway <i>and</i> the benefit of the doubt (&quot;hmm, that sounds a bit racist, but I respect this person - let me ask a question to see what they mean&quot;).  It seems to me that the places in which we can have those conversations are increasingly limited.  It definitely isn&#x27;t social media.  It&#x27;s not the workplace.  Apparently, it might not be academia, either, although I haven&#x27;t been in school for a long time and can&#x27;t speak from personal experience (stories like the one I just shared, though, seem to back up this impression).<p>We&#x27;re left with smart, intellectual, nuanced people having hushed conversations in coffee shops or pubs where no one can overhear them, because we&#x27;re all afraid of how our words might be twisted, misinterpreted, and ganged up on.  It&#x27;s a real shame.