Everybody talks though

“Yo Tip, I hear your side and everybody talk though”

–Kanye West, circa 2018

Ever since I heard it, this quote from the song “Ye vs. the People” has really stuck with me. And I’ll tell you why. Basically, this track is a back and forth between Kanye and T.I. in which he criticizes Kanye’s support of Donald Trump. The line opens up Kanye’s defense of himself. Despite not actually creating a real argument, this simple statement alone has so much inherent power in the modern day where everyone seems to have a strong opinion and endless platforms to print it on. Just by pointing out that an opposing viewpoint is nothing but “more chatter” in the already noisy internet, that viewpoint immediately loses some validity. Call him crazy, call him sick, call him what you want. But even if you don’t like what he says, there’s no doubt that Kanye West knows how to speak the language of our time.

Why am I even bringing this up? Well I’ve been noticing this trend for a while now. Online political discourse has become more like two toddlers yelling with their fingers in their ears and less like two adults paying careful attention to hear each other out. And I can’t blame anyone for this. After all, it’s completely natural for human beings to tune out the noise when there’s too much of it. Some people call this phenomenon “information overload” or “information anxiety”. This happens when a decision maker receives so many informational cues that the resulting complexity inhibits their ability to make an optimal or even rational decision. At the individual level, we have well-documented studies on our natural reaction to this kind of dilemma.

First, people respond by limiting any new information that might present itself. This is the “tuning out” I was mentioning where one might hear new evidence or a new argument but then consciously or subconsciously discredit it right away. The second response people typically have is to do a “brain dump”— purging out all their thoughts on paper. In 2019, the anxious brain dump is more likely to go on Facebook or Twitter.

Okay so what’s my point here? We live in a time where there is infinite print and infinite soundbites of information at our fingertips. Nobody teaches kids in school how to filter out the truth from the noise. So if over-information can genuinely cause a form of anxiety that provokes this kind of response, it’s important to be conscious of the possibility that the individuals dominating your news feed are not behaving rationally. Personally, this is not a hard assumption for me to make because the first thing you learn in an introductory economics class is that consumers/people generally do not behave rationally. But I guess that can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Regardless, it’s worth considering that maybe that person you see hysterically posting Facebook statuses is doing a necessary brain dump for their anxiety. Maybe that guy you see denying climate change on Twitter is acting out of fear instead of logic. Maybe you should read that article and think “yeah but everybody talks though.”

Obviously, discerning as a society what’s real and what’s fake is a much larger issue that we face. I’m not trying to propose a solution for that. But in the meantime, it might be best for me, you and everybody else not to waste our time paying any mind to people who are clearly using social media as their therapy.

Anyone can publish their thoughts. Read them with a grain of salt.

Filip, again.