Taking Responsibility For Shaping Our Society
When I was a child, my free time was spent with a bunch of
other kids in an empty field playing ball. There were no parents involved, they
trusted the group that we were hanging out with to look out for one another. I
can’t think of a time an adult was required to get us of out a mess we had
gotten ourselves into.
Not that it was all smooth sailing, of course. There was a
lot of arguing over the rules of the game, but we played a lot more than we
argued. We learned to work together, learned to compromise, learned that
sticking to your point, even when you were right, was less fun than just giving
in on what were ultimately small matters and getting on with the game. In this
way we learned skills that would serve us when we became adults and had to live
with each other when no one would be there to settle our disagreements.
In the neighborhood I live in now, there are no empty fields
where children can gather far from the watchful eyes of adults. We do have a
water park nearby, though. There are video cameras there that monitor those who
walk past the chain link fence. Lifeguards watch the children, most of whom are
also watched by helicopter parents. I worry that these children will never
learn how to negotiate the rules, but only learn to obey them.
The world needs adults who are skilled in negotiating
workable ways of arranging society. But we have been gradually abandoning our
role as adults, preferring to remain children. I suppose it began when television
entered our households. Spending more time with us and seeming to know more
than our parents, it assumed the role of a third parent. It told us what kinds
of food we’d like, what kind of language to use, and that purchasing things was
the way to happiness. But unlike our parents, the television could never be negotiated
with. We could only ever listen, not talk back.
Eventually, this first generation raised by television grew
to adulthood. But a funny thing happened: while our real parents grew older and
gradually passed the mantle of adulthood on to us, the television never did.
The television remained young, and it continued to speak to us as though we
were children. Television never had a rite of passage for us into adulthood. In
fact, it told us that youth was everything, and so most of us refused to grow
up and claim ownership of our society.
The transition from a society raised by parents to one
raised by the authority of television became most apparent to me in the time of
Jimmy Carter’s presidency. We were undergoing an energy crisis in the United
States, and I remember President Carter appearing on TV to address the nation.
He gave us the kind of advice our parents would have given us, what all parents
would tell their children. Rather than turn up the thermostat, you should wear
a sweater. By this time, we had learned from the television that our parents
were hopelessly out of touch with the times. In a short amount of time, the last
adult president would be replaced by a TV personality and pitchman.
The election of President Reagan was the victory of
television over those generations that were not raised with a TV in their
homes. The children were now firmly in the hands of the third parent, while mom
and dad were busy earning a living. When people talked at the water cooler at
work, they talked about what they saw on television the night before.
Television was the authority figure that never got old and never relinquished
its role as parent. In fact, it demanded you stay young.
By this point you’re probably wondering what all this has to
do with the censorship of social media. Simple. Social media is a field far
away from our parents, (i.e. the media). It is a place where we are allowed to
negotiate with others the rules by which we get along. In social media we can
talk not only with our friends and neighbors but also with those kids from another
neighborhood who just happen to be wanting to join the game.
It’s a second chance for us to work on the tools that are
necessary for adults to fashion the world rather allow it to be fashioned for
us by adults. It is not the media of a couple of decades ago, where the
information flowed in only one direction. Social media allows communication,
and it allows you to talk back to the media where others can actually watch and
be involved in the conversation. It is the answer to a media that supplanted
our parents as the voice of authority and has treated us like children for our
entire lives. The old media has finally grown feeble, and we have the
opportunity to become adults at last.
Some are afraid of this. While all of us have to act like
adults in our everyday lives, in our professional and family situations, we
have not had to act like adults in terms of constructing a functioning society
in a long time. Since most of us have never had to act like adults, we’d much
prefer to allow adult decisions to be made by those we’ve come to accept as
authority figures (i.e. whoever the media says is worthy). The media tells them
social media is dangerous, and says the adults will fix it for us.
Make no mistake, though, there are no adults other than
ourselves. In a group of children, the only ones brash enough to assume adult
roles are those who are least trustworthy of such responsibility. As children
they are known as troublemakers. As adults, we call them sociopaths.
These are the kind of people who want to take back control
of the conversation, who want to police social media. This will happen so long
as we permit ourselves to live in a society where communication flows only one
way, where we are afraid to take responsibility for fashioning the rules with the
other kids in the neighborhood, where our playgrounds are not open fields but fenced-in
areas where cameras and guards monitor our every move (unless you’re Jeffrey
Epstein).
It's time you moved out of your parents basement and made your way in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment