CURATE YR IDOLS

Many of my friends have left Facebook. If they haven’t deleted their profiles, they’ve disengaged from their accounts in such a way as to render them inactive. This is not uncommon. Since early 2014, nationally the narrative has been that millennials are leaving Facebook in droves (11 million left from 2011-’14), opting instead for platforms that allow them to engage with their friends with a heightened immediacy and sense of authenticity — Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, actual books.
Last week, in this very space, I related a quotation from the new book by famed New York Times columnist David Brooks, in which he (a man with decades of op-ed writing under his belt) confessed less than 100 percent confidence in his opinions.
In The Road to Character, Brooks writes he is someone who gets “paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality.”
Recently, during an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Brooks elaborated on this bit of candor, calling his role as columnist “weird” and said that being in front of a proverbial microphone “presents character challenges where we can think we’re right all the time or we get a lot of attention.”
Obviously, Brooks’ comments (which I’m visiting a second time) got me thinking.
Social media (along with message boards and self-publishing platforms like Medium) have made everyone a columnist. And to lend a voice to the op-ed section of the Interwebs (more specifically, Facebook) these days, all it takes is a shit-ton of digital friends and the right degree of algorithmic subversion. It also takes a decent amount of confidence (feigned or otherwise).
In many ways, this has been very good. Social and political awareness has been enhanced for (and by) populations previously disconnected from the modern world or just flat-out ignored (the initial uprisings in Egypt, circa 2011, were among the first and most powerful examples; the Baltimore rioting is a more current, perhaps equally as powerful one).
But, while social media platforms, forums, and message boards certainly spark conversations, I often wonder whether anyone ever actually closes their browser (or tablet application), having just been convinced to change a previously held opinion. On the contrary, with endless resources from which to affirm every belief system imaginable, no matter how wacky, unscientific, sexist, racist, (or all of the above), it often seems as though the digital realm is just a place to dig our heels in deeper.
Columnists like Brooks (as well as Krugman and Kristof, his contemporaries at The Times), have a distinct ability to clarify the obscure, to frame complex topics in a way that’s new or different. Generally, columnists enhance our understanding. So, with so many people sharing their opinions, I wondered if traditional columnists, like Brooks, were in danger of being drowned out by the noise.
I reached out to a few established voices in local media, all of whom have been in a position to “volley” their opinions for much longer than I have. What I found was that rather than feeling threatened, all felt social media enhances their roles as columnists. And across the board, those I polled felt, at the very least, despite its tendency to stiffen unfounded resolve, social media augments the conversation.
Tireless Folio Weekly political columnist AG Gancarski — whose appetite for engaging readers through Twitter and Facebook often appears insatiable — pointed out users can “track how our stuff is being shared, who’s reading it, and what resonates with readers and what doesn’t, in a way that word-of-mouth didn’t totally facilitate.”
On what guarantees he’ll be heard above the intense volume of the crowd, Gancarski said his particular voice is “idiosyncratic” (I agree); furthermore, he noted, “There also is the question of institutional authority; that is huge, both in terms of shares and deference we get from people who don’t have that.”
“If I was getting drowned out,” he
said, “it would mean I wasn’t a very
effective communicator.”
(CLICK)
“In my view, the more the merrier,” avuncular Times-Union columnist Ron Littlepage wrote in an email. “There are different audiences, but more people being involved in public debate is a good thing.”
Littlepage has been at it a long time, and his institutional memory (see: authority) has earned him a voice.
“I’ve been writing a column for 26 years now. I have loyal readers, even among those who disagree with me but read me anyway,” he wrote. “I don’t worry about my voice being drowned out. I think more voices add to the richness of the debate.”
(CLICK!)
Anne Schindler — whose voice occupied this space for many years, and whose reputation as a hard-hitting reporter proceeded her to her current role as executive producer of special investigations for First Coast News — called the new landscape “a crowded bathtub at times,” but said, ultimately “[social media] is better for community conversation.”
So I asked Schindler if she could think of a time when social media might be counterproductive to the conversation. She responded that “trolls wreck lots of otherwise productive discussions,” adding, “and we don’t always do our best thinking in 140 characters.”
So everyone has a platform. David Brooks was self-reflective enough to second-guess his deservedness of such a platform. The immediacy of interactions on social media often doesn’t allow for such reflection.
Luckily, it’s also never been easier to choose which voices occupy your feed. Disengaging — like engaging — is a tool in our digital box. Many of my generation have grown highly particular about their personal curating — how, when, and where they engage. As older generations (see: their parents) joined, and unwanted voices drowned out the ones that spoke to them, they left Facebook for greener pastures. It seems digital natives are more picky about which columnists are worth listening to than any algorithm could ever be.
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