A few weeks ago I came across a profound quote by Alan Lightman (physicist at MIT) on the role of a public intellectual which caught my attention. I was already quite disenchanted and annoyed at the superficial and pointless activism that has become malignant in our online lives and to an extent in our personal lives too. Before I share the quote, I must explain what the term “public intellectual” means. As per Lightman, such a person needs to a) be an expert in a particular field and b) must be involved in sharing their discourse or ideas to the larger public. Lightman continues to explain that once you become a public intellectual, the most important value that you need to practice is responsibility. Here’s what he says:
“Such a person must be careful, he must be aware of the limitations of his knowledge, he must acknowledge his personal prejudices because he is being asked to speak for a whole realm of thought, he must be aware of the huge possible consequences of what he says and writes and does. He has become, in a sense, public property because he represents something large to the public. He has become an idea himself, a human striving. He has enormous power to influence and change, and he must wield that power with respect.”
Now let’s look at the pseudo public intellectuals that you find parading on your social media feeds every single day; from Twitter to Instagram to Reddit. What these platforms have done is that they have allowed almost everyone to exercise the second characteristic that Lightman identified. They say that the world has become more opinionated today but I think it always was, we just have more platforms today to voice our opinions. If you have a social media account and some developed understanding of logical reasoning you will find numerous examples of posts, tweets, stories and comments that are so utterly asinine that you will wonder why are they receiving any sort of traction or attention.
The reason I decided to write this article is to shed some light on how we, collectively, are ruining the art of argument and conversation with the help of these social media giants and how normalised it has become to pass off fallacies as well educated opinions. I will explain two interconnected concepts in the context of social media discourse which I find the most problematic – logical fallacies and cancel and gotcha culture.
In doing so, hopefully, I will be able to demonstrate how flawed and unreasonable our conversations have become and might I say dangerous. So first let’s turn our attention to the first issue – logical fallacies. These are simply flaws in reasoning or illogical statements that when dissected or properly argued against, hold no intellectual value. There is a wide variety of these that exist but I will share some that are the most common.
Hasty generalisation: where a person will use a limited or small number of examples to make a claim that applies generally to everyone or everything. This is often the case when things like nationality, race, gender or sex are being discussed and statements like “men are sexual predators” or “women use sex to manipulate men” are used quite callously and often supported by 1 or 2 examples that are not enough to validate the claim the person is making about an entire population.
Affirming the consequent in which you claim that there is only one reason for the observation you are making and that reason is inferred from reversing an if-then statement around the observation and its consequence. I see this a lot when people discuss politics for example someone will say that a good minister is one that invests in public infrastructure. Shehbaz Sharif has always invested in public infrastructure and hence he is an excellent minister. The problem with this fallacy is that you are only using 1 out of a hundred different reasons why someone would be a good minister as it suits your narrative of speaking in favour of a politician.
Another is the slippery slope fallacy. We saw this being used a lot when Aurat March took place. It is when you say that a small step will bring about a series of negative often exaggerated consequences. Most of the criticism that took place of the Aurat March was the conservative segment of society claiming that this Aurat March will lead to homosexuality and men and women dancing naked in the streets. It is easy to see why this is problematic as these are just consequences that are being inferred by the people against it without any claims of these consequences being wanted or brought on by the side supporting it.
Lastly, the straw-man; when you can’t defend your position so you create a caricature or a simplified version of your opponent’s argument and start attacking that. Again, very common in politics and issues related to nationalism.
One of the major reasons that I think these fallacies have become so common place is that social media discourse is inherently geared towards shorter attention spans. Tweets, comments, and stories are supposed to be short and simple and when they are used to make socio-political statements they end up erroneously simplifying complicated issues and ideas.
Twitter doesn’t let you write more than 280 words and users have resort to threads to explain geo-political/social and economic events. Instagram stories have a time limit and even though you can make multiple stories, the interface gets clobbered with text and sometimes punctuated with ads that might dissuade readers.
I cannot talk about social media platforms and their inefficiency in creating effective discourse without talking about the nuisance that is gotcha or cancel culture. Please note that at this point I am referring to cancel culture as sort of widespread condemnation, marginalisation, shaming of individuals on the basis of their beliefs that might be subjectively offensive. I mean something like when Malala Yousafzai mentioned that when two people want to be together, why can they only do so through marriage? And then hundreds if not thousands of people went ahead and cancelled her for her comments.
I feel that social media has made debating, arguing and expression a way to achieve moral high ground or supremacy through evaluating it by likes and re-tweets/shares etc. Our counter arguments have become increasing vitriolic, where we attack or cancel people just for having differing views. Even when we are responding, we respond with the same fallacies that we were triggered by. Each person is only known through their alliance with a school of thought or a political party which then becomes their identity and no matter how much weight their argument bears, they are still cancelable due to their allegiances. Point scoring is common and proving that your opposite is just an illiterate lunatic is the main purpose.
Ultimately, cancel culture, the one where morality might not be subjective, is still not efficient. Ex CCPO Lahore Umer Sheikh is still employed, Ali Zafar still hosted the HUM Style awards, and Aamir Liaquat still gets paid millions to appear on your TV screens.
It is my hypothesis that people share opinions on social media, not to have a civil debate and engage in arguments, rather to toot their own horn and stay in their echo chambers where everyone who follows them likes and re-tweets them and anyone who disagrees is trolled, ridiculed and ignored/blocked. I find it ridiculous when people in my circle share their opinions on public incidents on their Instagram stories where almost everyone they know comes from the same socio-economic background as them and holds the same opinions.
Distancing myself from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook has made me realise that every time I meet someone, there are a certain set of topics that they will talk about and the next time I meet them they would have completely forgotten about them. I have also realised how pointless it is to argue with someone on the internet and how this mechanism of gratification (liking, sharing and re-tweeting) is no indicator of the quality of someone’s argument or opinion.
Unfortunately, these things are here to stay and the dumbing down of communication is in progress as we speak. Not even professional platforms like LinkedIn are safe anymore. I would like to say that I am surprised but I am not. Freedom of speech doesn’t automatically mean correctness and rationality of speech.
