The internet, oddly enough, is forcing us to communicate. Everyone interacts with text, not people, so our interactions are all basically the same. For example, the wonderful thing about forums is that every line that is typed in a conversation is there for anyone to read. So people quickly learn that misrepresenting other people is a bad idea, especially when the proof that you’re misrepresenting someone is just a few lines up.

The media is in the business of communication, not interaction. The only interaction they care about is the one in which you consume their product. And since journalism/marketing has historically been about communicating ideas to large audiences, they are well-positioned to take advantage of our tendency to interact instead of communicate. They inflame our passions and focus our beliefs, then they dumb everything down to a yes/no viewpoint. Why? Because it makes for passionate interactions with poor communication, which leads to even more passionate interactions with even worse communication. And as long as the public is arguing about something, people are opening newspapers, buying magazines, turning on televisions, and logging on to websites.

Politics is a particularly heated problem because (historically) people only interacted during controversial debates or in an already inflamed environment. An argument that has turned into a yelling match is just an interaction. The only thing they are communicating to one another is their emotions. It isn’t until the reasonable part of the mind takes over that the yelling subsides and the conversation actually progresses.

And then there’s the internet, that massive repository of human knowledge and suppository of human interaction. If humanity seems so infantile online, it’s because we are. When they first introduced the telephone, the telephone companies had to invent the greeting “Hello” to stop people from simply hanging up at the silence on the other end. When they first introduced the car, people were driving so recklessly that they make modern teenagers look like AARP members.

The internet didn’t even exist a generation ago, and we’re still learning to use it. We’re still experiencing things that humanity has never dealt with before. How do you turn the internet off when your government is trying to manipulate an election? How do you hide illegal weapon caches when there are images that anyone online can google? How do you convince millions of people they are being lied to when everything they see/hear/read tells them otherwise? These are just a few of the seemingly limitless problems that we face.

The irony of the information age is that we are learning more about everything than we are taking the time to understand. We need to hold on to our humanity during this unprecedented transitional period in our development. We have to remember that communication, even on the most basic levels, is more important now than ever.

You could be watching these right now…

There’s a huge difference between subjective and objective. Opinions and beliefs are subjective; facts and statistics are objective. The belief that Justin Bieber is a musical genius is subjective; the fact that he is a highly-marketed adolescent is objective. We cannot be held responsible for our opinions because we do not choose what we will believe, but our opinions don’t change things that are simple fact. So, if someone believes that homosexuality is abnormal, they are completely entitled to that opinion or belief. But the fact that homosexuality is not abnormal just means they’re just misinformed. And if they want to stick beside that belief even in the face of evidence, it just means they’re a bigot.

And bigotry has no place in this world anymore.