Here us another excellent comment regarding social media, this one from Glenn Logan. His focus is on what he calls “emotional sewage,” and its poisonous effect on reason, discourse and society.
He takes off from the end of my post about a Facebook friend’s outburst. Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote Of The Day: A Lovely, Smart, Trump-Deranged, Left-Biased Facebook Friend”:
“Nevertheless, this and posts like it, appearing every day on social media, weaken and divide the country and incrementally replace rational thought with raw emotion, bigotry and stupidity.”
This is the thing that gets me about social media — the low barrier for production and amplification of echo-chamber emotional sewage.
That’s what this virtue-signalling nonsense is — emotional sewage that is polluting our culture to the point that it threatens to become the mainstream, and remove reasonable people to the rump.
When interactions were mostly one-to-one or one-to-few, emotional sewage like this tended to get sorted out very quickly because the perpetrators were forced to deal face-to-face with their peers and address rational arguments against their effluvia. In the end, it was contained, often reconsidered and refined into something less putrid and, if not exactly reasoned, at least reasonable in a broad sense.
With social media, which provides a one-to-many construct, there is no such refinement. Raw emotional sewage is dumped out there and amplified, taking it from revolting straight to toxic. The sewer rats all band together in their virtuous righteousness, oblivious to the funk they produce and the normal people they sicken, and attack those who dare to disagree like hungry piranha.
Social media has enabled this sad state of affairs, but blaming the medium is very much like blaming the knife or gun for murder. What social media has proven is that if you can get a pack together on any given point that is large and aggressive enough, you can crush dissent on a massive scale, and drive differing viewpoints from the marketplace of ideas no matter how messed up your own views are.
Benjamin Franklin once answered a lady regarding the form of government the Founders produced in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and he answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” 230 years later, Dr. Franklin’s words haunt us — can we keep our republic, or will it drown in emotional sewage?
Ethics Alarms 
Great comment Glen.
Sounds similar to what happens when mob rules take over a mob and they seek vigilante justice that’s devoid of rotational thinking.
What exactly is ‘rotational thinking?’ Looking to learn a new term.
If it was a result of a spell checker run amuck, then comments like ‘think wheels’ are unjustified…
slickwilly wrote, “If it was a result of a spell checker run amuck, then comments like ‘think wheels’ are unjustified…”
I have no freaking idea how that got there! LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think I’ll just blame that on a food coma induced brain fart.
Congrats, Glenn. Well thought out
Maybe this is the REAL brown, stinky tide.
Excellent. You clearly expressed some muddled thoughts I had been having about this and could never make stick together. I view what you said as Glenn’s corollary to Gresham’s law: “bad discourse drives out good.”
Glenn’s is one of the best comments I have read on this blog since I started following it in 2011 – definitely the best comment I have read this year.
Without comment, here’s some more raw emotional sewage.
The answer to this is obvious…it won’t. Since this entire story is based on idle speculation and wishful thinking (partially fueled by HRC), there is no story to break. Sorry. Learn to cope.
dunno where the quote is from, but I like it:
“Life is full of disappointments. Learn to live with it.”
Zoltar’s spelling mistake, in the sentence he used it, does define a lot of what is on the social media when I look at it: rotational thinking.
Someone begins a rant and is joined by others, until another party chimes in to say what really happened and you can look it up, and is joined by others.
The effect is very much like seeing the hands move on a clock dial.
They become part of the hive mind. 🙂