DISCUSSION #5
What Is Extremism? What Is Racism? How Does the Internet Affect Both?
Oct 10, 2022. By Sierra Zhang
I believe in a future where we stop categorizing people but treat everyone simply as a human — we stop judging people by their skin tones, sex or gender, nationality, ethnicity, social status, family background, and so on, but a generic human being. Instead, we look into everybody and assess if they have done something great, made any positive contributions, achieved incredible results, or are simply lovely human beings. We praise the good and punish the bad regardless of their superficial characteristics. Opportunities and appreciation are always offered to those who genuinely deserve them regardless of their superficial characteristics, and no group is deliberately given more or less chance.
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Digital polarization is strikingly similar to what Whitney Phillips, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, illustrated in the book You Are Here — an “oddly split scene” created by the sunlight (Philips and Milner 2). That is, polarization is based on the network crisis developed over time, intensified by pollution of the media landscape, and has no borders, just like the split Phillips has seen is based on an environmental crisis — universal pollution of the environment (3). In my experience, polarizations continue to intensify as government officials utilize their influence and the ease of social media to spread disinformation for their own interests. For example, Green Hill Software CEO Dan O’Dowd is running for U.S. senator through a campaign that debunks Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system as children killers. His fuzzy video clip shows the tester deliberately ignoring the warning messages and driving into the child dummies by pressing the accelerator to override manually (@RealDanODowd). With 1.1 million views, it is safe to assume that his campaign spread misleading information to those who are not familiar with the technology.
Read the Original Articles
At the end of their introduction, Philips and Milner invite us to approach the network crisis thoughtfully, to perceive the crisis systematically (as influenced dots), and to pick up our own responsibilities (Philips and Milner 12). As someone who hates when I see any source polluting the media landscape for their benefit (for example, some YouTube Short videos that share fake knowledge for views), I would first treat things on the web with a grain of salt and avoid being guided to one polarizing end, then start from myself to avoid sharing polarizing information that distorts the fact. It is also one of my dreams to either run non-profit campaigns or try to be an influencer myself when I have all the necessary resources later in my life and try to fight with network crisis, clean the media landscape, and reshape related education with collective force and empower people to have easy access to credible knowledge and proved facts.
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I selected “Principled Uncertainty: Why Learning to Ask Good Questions Matters More than Finding Answers” written by PIL Provocation Series contributing editor Barbara Fister as I think in the age of network crisis, failing to question things would be one reason why misinformation can be spread this far. The lacking of individual thinking pushes us to believe things as is without further questioning their credibility. After further analysis of this article, I noticed that editor Fister argued that methods of education partly underlie the lack of good questions, “the way we learn how to explore uncertainties has a profound impact on how we practice curiosity” (Fister). Recently, I discussed with my friends during lunch hours how I am, to a certain extent, disappointed about what I have learned in quite a few classes in college. In those classes, we practice learning with “clear roadmaps and defined boundaries” (Fister) — the exams are heavily focused on memorization of even the most minor details covered in lectures. For example, there would be multiple choice questions like “which of these four characteristics of Object A was not mentioned in the lecture?” And in a recent group project in one of these classes, we were almost scared to make risky decisions that were not based on textbooks due to strict grade boundaries and the importance of that class in the major declaration (I am trying not to call out specific classes here…). In my opinion, in those classes, we are not encouraged to perform our right to try everything, make mistakes, and learn skills to challenge things. And seeing the facial expressions of many of my classmates, I would assume that we feel the pressure of grades more so than we feel the delight of knowledge in these classes.
Do not get me wrong; we have truly inspiring classes here at Cal (for example, this class is truly inspiring!). However, even in a prestigious institution like ours, we are still facing the issue that some of our instructional methods in some classes do not stimulate “genuine curiosity,” a characteristic that is, in Fister’s words, “desperately needed” in today’s network crisis and information pollution (Fister). This hints that the instructional methods nationwide require changes.
