National Post
How the Internet makes us dumb
By Jonathan Kay
Back in late 2009, when many still believed that Sarah Palin was the future of American politics, left-wing filmmakers Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll took their camera to a Borders book store in Columbus, Ohio, where the former Alaska governor was signing copies of her book Going Rogue. Whiteside and Stoll went up and down the line-up of Palin fans, conducting brief interviews, and then uploaded edited snippets to YouTube.
Surprise, surprise: The interviewees all sound like idiots. "She's the epi - epitome of conservative-ness," says one dazed-seeming fellow in a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket. "She gonna get the presidency!"
Another woman added that Palin stood for "cutting taxes, making a more, um, you know, entre-pe-noorial, um, just, um, like, conducive environment for our country, you know?"
The video went on for eight minutes like this. It quickly got tedious. And we didn't really learn anything from it: No matter our place on the political spectrum, most of us sound dumb when someone suddenly puts a microphone in front of us and asks for our opinion. Palin fans aren't special in this respect.
Nevertheless, the Borders video got almost two million hits. And the reason is obvious: It confirmed, in capsule form, the stereotypes that tens of millions of liberals have about Sarah Palin.
The political act of explaining why one likes, or doesn't like, a particular politician or policy once required thought and argument - effort, in other words. Now, it's so much easier: You just paste a single YouTube link to your Facebook page, and you're done. On to the next issue.
Two years later, exactly the same trick is underway on the other side of the political spectrum: Lazy conservatives who instinctively are repelled by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but can't be bothered to intellectually engage with the issue, are circulating their own YouTube hits - alleging not just stupidity and bad hygiene, but also anti-Semitism. A popular one (200,000 hits so far) called "Anti-Semitic Protester at Occupy Wall Street - LA" features a woman who declares: "The Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve - they need to be run out of this country."
Armed with video snippets such as these, an American conservative group is running a slick ad suggesting that the Occupy movement is basically just one big Democratic-supported anti-Semitic jamboree. Links to their ad, and the accompanying anti-Semitism claim, are all over my Twitter feed. Opponents of Occupy don't even have to watch the video: They can confirm all their pre-existing biases about the movement in 140 characters or less.
The reality about Occupy? That's more boring. This week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen - one of those Zionist Jews who supposedly are in danger of getting lynched by Occupy protesters - made his way to Lower Manhattan to observe the pogroms. He sums up his experience thusly: "Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry - not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to Google the phrase 'Zionists control Wall St.' Google 'nut case' instead."
Cohen isn't arguing that the anti-Semitic nuts who occasionally pop up at Occupy movements aren't despicable. And neither am I. But all recent mass movements, from trade unions and anti-globalization protests to Tea Party rallies and Canada's Reform Party, have attracted bigots. Intelligent people don't judge a movement on the basis of the fringe haters they inevitably attract.
I'm old enough to remember the early 1990s, a time when starry-eyed futurists believed the Internet would make all of us smarter. We would learn new languages, surf newspapers from around the world, cultivate international pen pals, become more enlightened people by exposing ourselves to different opinions. Twenty years later, it turns out that all this was starry-eyed nonsense: All we want from the web is to have our own ideological biases read back to us in the most hysterical and entertaining form possible - preferably with neat little YouTube links that we can pass around to our friends.
Experts call it the "confirmation bias" - our natural psychological attraction toward data or anecdotes that serve to support our pre-existing attitudes and bigotries. It's something that always has been part of human nature. But the combination of social media with cheap online video technology has turbocharged the confirmation bias to the point where rational political dialogue is in danger of extinction.
In its place: rank partisans sending out links to the like-minded, along with the mantra for this new age: "Watch the video! I was right all along."
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Internet+makes+dumb/5612975/story.html
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