Mass Misrepresentation

There's plenty of reasons to be terrified while watching the news. I lost focus months ago like an ostrich diving into the sand, but I still hear plenty. 

Serious world issues aside, one of the ideas that kept coming back to me is that today, we are accountable for everything we say. It doesn't matter how big your audience is or how important you are. If you ever become relevant, every piece of information about you is fair game. 

The internet is a dangerous place, especially for someone who records random thoughts on a daily basis. 

Does having this information help us? We can now see pieces of anyone's life from ten years ago. We can learn an incredible amount about people without ever knowing them. 

In many ways, we have access to people's lives that we have no right to. We see the most glamorous bits and pieces of people we will never know or care deeply about. This goes for politicians we claim to hate and celebrities we claim to love; it also holds whether or not they are presenting an image of themselves or whether someone else is spinning an image of them. 

We don't know the people we watch or read about. We can't love them or understand them as a person beyond a superficial level. We don't get to see their strengths and weaknesses in person. 

There are obvious objections. We may have a legitimate interest in a person's success or failure if that person is running for some sort of office. We may claim that how someone present themselves in public should give us an idea of who they are as a person. We may have followed someone's story for so long that we feel invested in their lives. 

We should absolutely be able to judge someone for a position based off their track record, but emphasizing who our celebrities or politicians are as people is a far more slippery slope. There is no way to unravel lifetime's worth of context less quotes and inappropriate statements from years or even weeks in the past to cut to the heart of who a person is. We have to get to know someone through human interaction to pass a true character judgement at a given moment. 

There are an impossible number of variables to quantify when it comes to understanding a human being. Even when we know someone for years they can still surprise or shock or disappoint us. Taking what we see presented to us about a person, even if what is presented is a person's own damning testimony or filthy slurs, and cutting a person to fit the description we design based off that presentation is dehumanizing. 

So what is the point of all this? We need information about our potential leaders, and a lack of media coverage, however convoluted the coverage may be, would be a recipe for disaster. I am not arguing that we should suspend our best judgement about who is fit for a job. I am making the case that the media makes its profits by framing and even tearing people's lives apart.

Our brains are designed to understand nuance and ambiguity in ourselves and others, and we can judge many aspects of a person without letting sensationalism and scandal drive us to deterministic conclusions about that person's character.