The Good Old Days

It’s December 11th, 2021 as I write this. We’re all trying to remember life before the pandemic — the first in our lifetime — and trying to get our heads around what seems to many of us to be a world that has turned… what is the word? Oh yes. Crazy.

To try to bring some context to today’s headlines, I thought I’d look back at this date 20 years ago. It was three months after the attacks of 9-11. We were still feeling unified, though the politicians were going back to their natural partisan ways. We wondered if Christmas shopping was safe. A lot of people weren’t traveling by air, but Richard Reid did, and tried to blow up his shoe.

Back then some people still thought China was a good citizen of the world, and they were welcomed to the World Trade Organization. Many people now see them differently.

In 2001 the acronym LGBTQ didn’t have a Q, and in fact it hardly had a T. The discussions about how many genders there are hadn’t made it into society yet, other than the stodgy old default answer of “two.” The only personal pronoun issue revolved around the Mrs./Miss/Ms question.

Also, 20 years ago, many people still felt like it was okay to download “free” music. Facebook was mostly only used by college students. You couldn’t get kicked off of Twitter for having an unpopular (according to Twitter management) opinion, because Twitter didn’t yet exist. Amazon was primarily an on-line book store.

You had to take a cab, because Uber was eight years away. You could, however, look up things like that on Wikipedia, which started in 2001. So did I-Tunes. AOL was still a big deal.

It’s hard to remember, but I think 20 years ago today a lot of people were feeling down, because of 9-11, and because of the hit our economy took in its aftermath, not to mention the military action in Afghanistan. Today we have the on-going pandemic to keep us emotionally and economically down. We also have a troubling erosion of freedom of speech that makes people afraid to speak up about some topics for fear of being, “canceled.”

It makes a person wonder if there will be a Facebook or Twitter 20 years from now. Maybe Amazon will grow so large that it explodes into white light.

It’s hard to imagine that societal change can continue at the pace it’s been moving. Maybe, 20 years from now, we’ll look back in disbelief at what is happening now, or remember these times as “the good old days.”

You Can’t Read That

In recent weeks the people who run some of the biggest and most influential social media web sites decided that some information, or “content” as they call it, is not for you.  They are pretty sure that you don’t have the ability to judge for yourself if that content is valid or invalid, true or false. 

Some of the banned news has to do with emails that were discovered.  Other banned information concerns topics that these web sites find too inflammatory or contributing to conspiracy theories.  And, it’s not just information that has been held back.  People who have large audiences of followers have been summarily thrown off of platforms simply for discussing the taboo topics.

A person could look at who and what Youtube and Twitter have banned and say that there is a political motive behind it.  I guess that depends what your politics are.  What can be said with certainty is that you and I are being told, by this censorship, that we are not capable of making judgements about what we see or read.

The funny thing is that we are making these kinds of judgements every day.  Whether it is advertisements for nutritional supplements that will magically cure everything from impotence to memory loss, or ads that suggest we buy lottery tickets (the chance of winning the Powerball lottery is one in 293 million), we are responsible for making up our own minds based on the information, the source of the information, and what the vendor of that information has to gain by us believing it.

Only the most naïve person would say that all the news on TV or in newspapers is accurate.  Whether by intent or incompetence, a grain of salt is needed every day.  Unfortunately, some people continue to talk about “news” that never happened as if it did.  In fact, they do that on Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook every day.

A while back I reposted something on Facebook and received a message from them saying it was removed because the statistics used could be misleading.  The source of the statistics was the Centers for Disease Control, but I guess Facebook knows best.

To be honest, newspaper and television editors choose not to share many news stories every day, either because they think it isn’t of interest, or because it doesn’t fit with their world view.  It’s human nature for them to edit out things they don’t like.  But, I think it is their job to fight that urge.

I think that the social media platforms that censor information shouldn’t.  It would be a little patronizing, but perhaps useful, if they occasionally posted suggested guidelines for readers, suggesting strategies for determining what information we consume is legitimate. 

One thing we know for sure is that these days, perhaps because of the impending election, nobody is getting all the news from Facebook, Youtube, or Twitter.  If there is a bright side to these latest examples of social media censorship it is that we now know where they stand, and can be alerted to it going forward.