Short read.
Memes & Cancel Culture.
Has the collective mindset cancelled critical-thinking skills?
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Memes are great, they’re fun ways to share information, but has overuse made humans less unique and less able to discern fact from fiction?
The discussion on misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation has opened a lot of people's eyes to deception, but it is still rife on social media.
I’m not too worried about our youth, to be honest, they seem a lot more discerning about information than adults. It’s their parents I’m concerned about, the ones who weren’t taught right from wrong when it comes to internet use.
I hear a lot about teens spending too much time on social media when in actual fact a lot of children are missing out on face-to-face time with their parents because they’re too busy trying to take photos of “family time” for their social media pages.
How many times do you see the same meme shared by millions of people talking about how different they are from everybody else? Yeah right, you are so unique, that’s why millions of people shared the same meme.
Or worse, when they’re publicly posting how private they are. Yes, you’re such a private person that your entire social media presence is public.
Didn’t we remove subliminal messaging from ads because they program the brain to purchase a particular product? Now we’ve got more ads than we’ve ever had.
Memes spread popular opinion or whoever's paid the most for their opinion to be the loudest, and there’s rarely any debate because cancel culture makes excuses for everything and stunts critical thinking skills.
Exposure to short bursts of data lacking detail teaches the brain to accept information without requiring higher-order thinking, which makes people more vulnerable to thinking like the group rather than thinking for themselves. Group thinking has its benefits, so long as you’re aware it’s happening.
“They may also not be able to make decisions on their own. They often feel isolated or stressed when making decisions. That’s why they turn to a hive mentality.” — Dr Dan Brennan.
Look at the comments on memes and there are so many people following the same line of thought that it feels cult-like, I’m always relieved when someone pipes up and upsets the balance.
If you took the sum of all the memes you've ever read, I wonder how many research papers or books you could have read instead.
How many books did you read your children this week? At least try to read more words to your children than you read about your friends and strangers on social media.
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