The Misinformation Age.
A conversation on this video:
https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/maga-hat-wearing-teens-taunting-native-american-elder-spark-condemnation-from-hollywood-1203112838/
When I was in 7th grade, I was in religion class, although it was more history class. I was never sure which class they were teaching because the same teacher taught both History and Religion. Side story - I won most improved in Religion class that year, which I’m assuming equates to a first row ticket to heaven… So I got that going for me. I had an amazing teacher, his name was Mr.Williamson, we all called him ‘Mr. Will.’ Mr. Will gave an intro to one class where we talked about how we were living at the beginning of the “Information Age.” Where all information will be easily accessible at your finger tips. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, were all indexing all this information.
Now, I’m not sure I could have guessed how crazy the world was going to get. How connected it was going to get, but Mr.Will was right, we were at the entry point to the age of information… and you know what happens when everyone has all the information? A MASSIVE game of telephone happens, on a global scale.
Have you ever played that game where you line up 15 kids in a row and you give one of them a message, and the goal of it is to have the same message being said by the person at the end of the row after they whisper it to each person one after the other, and when you start with “Brad Pitt is good looking,” you normally end with “The annexation of Puerto Rico in the movie, the Little Giants, played an enormous role in shaping the economy of today.” Yada yada yada.
So what happens when everyone is trying to pass messages to each other and not being heard. They get louder, and so one that starts with a grain of truth will be manipulated through someones lens and then catch fire.
This week there was this kid from some school, somewhere who was a, pardon my French, ‘dick’ to a Native American elder. The media took this and decided that this kid now represents all that is wrong with America, and because CNN reported on it, everyone decided it was true that this kid somehow represents everything wrong with America, so the world piled on their opinions. Then more information was released about it and how the native americans were trying to instigate the system, and so then some percentage of people were like “oh, I didn’t realize.”. And then more videos came to light where this kid was mean again. And so it goes.
I read comments that were: “I hate to see the mob mentality take hold.” When describing this high schoolers encounter with these native americans, laying blame to the ignorance of this kid.
Isn’t that what everyone did though? Everyone on social media, provoked by the media, went red with rage, and ganged up on a bunch of high school kids who for some reason now represent the Trump administration and the evil of the everything?
Look, the highschooler might be racist, the kids might be the worst humans to ever exist, I don’t know. But the video in question is a kid staring at a Native American, with no fight occurring. And every comment is speculation. It would be like a video of a bar fight, where people just stared at each other. But we as society decided that this native American represents all Native Americans and this stupid kid represents all kids.
If you judged me for one moment in Highschool. Like - you saw me punch someone in the face, or get skewered with a lacrosse stick in the middle of the dining halls with hockey pads, or drinking an entire bottle of Tabasco sauced, and I happened to be wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, does that mean that I suddenly represent that brand?
We are in a vacuum of likes and miss-information. We believe that every moment is an attack on our value system in some capacity in the digital world. And we want to be first to judge. “Do it for the likes.” Is a common moniker in the world today, and that sometimes takes precedent over truth. It’s disappointing, but loud is better than good in todays day and age.
The thing that is clear to me is that no one can agree on their value system of belief in todays day. Which means everyones identities are in flux.
And by the way, this kid, if he’s smarter than everyone thinks he is, the way that Kim Kardashian turned her sex tape into a Multi Billion dollar empire, he will be able to turn this into a run for presidency.
By the way, was last weeks news cycle so slow that this was what the media cared about? What is not being covered right now because everyone is paying attention to this? What ACTUAL news is being overlooked.
By Adam Draper
I ponder as a VC.
It's a quick one minute read to make you think, smile, or laugh.
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