Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Social Media Matters

I quite often hear this criticism of libertarians that we should "get out from behind our keyboards and go do stuff that matters."
It irks me. First of all, it simply shows that the people making that criticism likely have little interaction with activism outside of social media. If this wasn't true then they would clearly see Libertarians actively and physically involved in many things from lobbying at the capitol, to organizing campaigns, helping out with causes, etc.
But secondly is this idea that somehow having conversations on social media is meaningless and fruitless. I believe that our ability to reason together afforded by the means of social media is one of the greatest change agents of our time. To dismiss this is to dismiss the importance of human reason all together.
We are having conversations and people are being exposed to thoughts and ideas that they were previously well insulated from.
Take for instance the seemingly silly and simple "Taxation is theft" campaign currently rounding the meme-dom. Do you realize that this simple phrase is something that many people have never even considered before? They've simply blindly, by no fault of their own mind you, accepted the premise that the state has a prior claim to all property.

Regardless of how they respond to the presentation of the idea, the fact of the matter is that a powerful message conveying some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance has made its way past the mental firewall inculcated by their cultural upbringing, and it's all because of the ease of communication that internet technology has opened up to us.
The human mind, absent mental illness or willful ignorance, will simply not allow cognitive dissonance to persist, it is hard wired to resolve it. Any challenging of an idea with a weak premise is effective in eventually changing the public perception of the idea and social media as well as similar technology is only causing this to happen on an exponentially increasing scale for many different issues.
It is anything but meaningless and fruitless to be able to converse and reason and argue with one another in a way that affords physical safety and a large degree of freedom, in fact it may be the most important thing happening to humanity in quite some time.

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