Collectively we have suffered from journo-genic effects. Our collective sense making apparatus has malfunctioned turning us insane. In this modern landscape we depend on journalism to make sense of the world, unfortunately "the news" is just homogenised noise filling that space.
Without useable sense making apparatus we collectively come to wrong conclusions, or fail to hear what the other side of the argument is, inferring it.
Social media has presented a new landscape in which alternative narratives have flourished. This new landscape comes with many unknown yet to be discovered rules. We did not evolve for Facebook or Tweeter.
People are way more likely to act rude, aggressively, or threateningly on social media probably to do with the dissonance of no physical person in front of you; (people can easily shout abuse at an inanimate object, like an apple, in real life without feeling bad, whereas shouting abuse at a person in real life is different). This is an example of one of the many challenges we face with navigating these modern landscapes.
We have suffered from the influence of politicians who play to their audiences and are not allowed to saying anything openly for fear of being destroyed by the media.
and also suffered from becoming our own politicians through use of social media, and playing to our audiences to not lose followers.
This relates to our culture of fear, where for example, we claim age of terrorism despite it being the age of safety. The culture of fear arises through processing fear in terms of possibility of things happening as opposed to in terms of probability of things. This is a pathogenic way of processing fear as everything is possible, and also prevents correct response to problems, as not everything is probable, so resources should be allocated to probable things, instead of possible things.
Through this fear and this lack of sense making apparatus, we perceives threats where there are none when inquiries are made on certain issues; sex, gender, race, religion, politics, etc.
If we can successfully arm the population with the tools of the enlightenment, on a population level we can have critical discussions and prob solve anything.
