I sit here pondering: were we better off living with a level of ignorance about the society in which we live? I ask myself this question frequently.
The internet is a fantastic invention. It has opened the world to us in real time. Information that once required a trip to the library, a newspaper archive or considerable research is now sitting in our hands.
Social media, on the other hand, has achieved the dubious distinction of showing me just how many ill-informed, childish adults live in this country.
Honestly, sometimes I think it was better when I simply didn’t know and wasn’t presented with the evidence daily.
Before social media, our impression of society was largely formed by the people we actually encountered: family, colleagues, neighbours, clients, friends, people in shops, in the pub, at the footy and in community organisations.
Inevitably, that was a filtered sample because we generally tend to gravitate to like.
Our broader exposure to human behaviour came through newspapers, TV, books, history, documentaries and other sources that generally had some form of editorial filter between someone’s thought and its presentation to the world.
Then social media arrived and the walls came down.
In the beginning, it felt rather different. It was largely about connecting with family and friends, exchanging ideas and discovering people with shared interests.
But humankind being what it is, we managed to turn much of it into a battlefield and, increasingly, into a mechanism for inflating the ego through likes, shares and followers.
Suddenly we were introduced to millions of people we would never otherwise have encountered, including their completely unedited thoughts. And often it’s an opening into the truly bizarre.
Some of those thoughts were probably better left unshared because, once you’ve seen them, they’re hard to un-see. And we’re left pondering the increasingly familiar question: what planet are you living on and worse?
I was reminded of that again a few days ago while reading a Facebook post by our very gracious Governor-General.
Among the comments were the now familiar demands that she sack Anthony Albanese and his government.
So, for the record, the Governor-General is NOT Albanese’s friend simply because he appointed her, and she DOES NOT have the authority to step in and sack him or his government simply because people think they’re hopeless.
She’s not there to clean up the electoral mess made by, I suspect, more than a fair share of the juveniles now demanding that she do so.
But it was the behaviour that interested me more than the politics.
Over perhaps the past five years in particular, the transition from social media as a place for sharing and discussion to something considerably uglier seems to have accelerated.
One of the things we’ve effectively removed is many of the old social restraints on making a fool of yourself publicly.
The internet democratised access to knowledge. Social media democratised the broadcasting of ignorance.
And the Governor-General’s post demonstrated the extraordinary irony of those two things happening simultaneously.
We have probably never had easier access to information about how our democracy actually works.
Within minutes, anyone commenting on that post could discover the constitutional role of the Governor-General, the circumstances surrounding the reserve powers and why a Governor-General cannot simply dismiss a democratically elected government because a collection of angry people on Facebook demands it.
Yet some people appear completely uninterested in finding out before confidently telling the Governor-General how to do her job.
That got me thinking about earlier generations.
Were they smarter than people today? Probably not. Every generation undoubtedly contained its share of fools. But perhaps the behaviour was different.
There was a stronger cultural expectation that you didn’t confidently pronounce on something about which you knew absolutely nothing. Knowledge and experience carried a certain authority. If you didn’t understand constitutional law, you probably didn’t lecture the Governor-General about her constitutional powers.
Let’s face it, the tool to do it — social media — wasn’t available anyway.
There was also considerably more friction involved in broadcasting an opinion. You could write a letter to the editor. You could phone talkback radio. You could stand up at a public meeting. You could argue with someone face-to-face. But each required some effort and, importantly, there was a social cost attached to making an absolute goose of yourself in public.
Social media has reduced that friction to virtually zero.
Thought enters head → fingers hit keyboard → published to potentially thousands of people.
The useful intermediate stage called “Perhaps I should think about this first” seems to have disappeared. More bizarrely, some people appear to relish making fools of themselves.
Someone posts nonsense. People hit Like. Others repost it. Someone congratulates them for “speaking the truth”. The original poster receives a rush of digital adrenaline from the validation, and the ego expands.
And suddenly ignorance isn’t embarrassing.
It’s rewarding.
But what about education?
There was once an expectation that adulthood brought with it a certain amount of practical civic knowledge — how governments worked, what different institutions did, where authority rested and, importantly, what responsibilities accompanied voting.
Not everyone understood those things deeply. Of course they didn’t.
But there was less expectation that every personal dissatisfaction entitled you to some extraordinary institutional intervention.
Whenever the subject of the Governor-General and the Constitution arises, the familiar cry goes up:
“But we don’t teach this in schools anymore.”
Perhaps we don’t teach enough of it. But I’m not sure that entirely explains what we’re seeing.
Here’s an interesting observation.
Judging purely from the profile photographs attached to many of the comments, and accepting the obvious limitations of doing so, a fair proportion appear to come from people who left school several decades ago. These aren’t all 20-year-olds who somehow slipped through a modern education system without being taught civics.
And there’s something else.
We have the internet. That magnificent invention I mentioned at the beginning.
We have never had greater access to credible information. Government websites, parliamentary resources, universities, constitutional experts, libraries and historical records are available to us without leaving the lounge room.
Once, not knowing something could genuinely be the result of not having ready access to the information. Although many of us did have the requisite set of encyclopaedias sitting on the bookshelf.
Today, discovering the basic constitutional role of the Governor-General requires little more than a few minutes and a search engine. As does checking most things. It takes very little time to test the veracity of a claim before adding to the pile-on.
And therein lies the contradiction that fascinates me.
The internet gave us unprecedented access to knowledge.
Social media gave us an unprecedented ability to express ourselves without acquiring any of it first.
So perhaps the problem isn’t simply that we stopped teaching people certain things.
Perhaps somewhere along the way we also weakened the expectation that adults have some responsibility to teach themselves.
I see this frequently in political debate.
Someone announces that a particular party “has no policies”. Ask whether they have actually looked at what the party has published and surprisingly often the answer amounts to:
“No. They should tell me.”
In other words: spoon-feed me.
The information is sitting there. It may be one search away. But apparently the responsibility for acquiring it belongs to somebody else.
Not knowing something isn’t stupidity. None of us knows everything.
Refusing to find out, while confidently insisting that you do know, is something altogether different.
When confidence beats competence
- Social media has added something particularly corrosive to all of this.
- Confidence is rewarded more than competence.
- And increasingly, we see the same phenomenon in political life.
The person saying:
“I don’t actually know enough about the Governor-General’s reserve powers to have an informed view.” Gets ignored.
The person shouting: “SACK ALBANESE NOW!!! YOU HAVE THE POWER!!!” Gets 300 likes.
The politician who says: “I will give you what you want.” Gets thousands of followers and a media headline.
The politician who says: “I can’t give you what you want, and here’s why.” Is ignored.
The same mechanism operates in those endless “WHERE ARE YOUR POLICIES?” posts.
The anti-mob swings into action, the likes balloon, everyone congratulates one another, and any suggestion that the policies are actually published and perhaps people might read them is completely ignored.
Because the point is no longer necessarily to discover the answer. The performance itself has become the point.
And eventually the platform teaches people which behaviour receives attention. People learn very quickly how to capitalise on it because attention itself provides a twisted sense of importance.
Perhaps that is one of social media’s most profound effects on public discourse. It hasn’t merely given everyone a voice. It has created incentives around how that voice is used.
- Certainty attracts more attention than doubt.
- Outrage travels further than reflection.
- Simple answers outperform complicated ones.
And being loudly wrong can bring considerably more validation than quietly taking five minutes to discover whether you are right.
So, in thinking about it, perhaps I was wrong when I wondered whether previous generations were smarter. Perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps they simply lived in a society with stronger social incentives not to behave stupidly in public.
There was a value placed on knowledge, experience and restraint. There was also a social consequence attached to making an absolute fool of yourself — something that the anonymity, immediacy and validation mechanisms of social media have substantially eroded.
We’re not going to uninvent social media, nor should we want to uninvent the internet that made this extraordinary connected world possible. So maybe the question we should be asking is not how we turn the clock back.
It’s how we find the switch that changes the behaviour.
How do we make knowledge more valuable than noise, competence more respected than confidence, and thinking before speaking something worth doing again?
Because perhaps we weren’t better off living in ignorance of society after all.
Perhaps we were simply better off when ignorance wasn’t rewarded with applause.
