Missing Out on Shades of Gray

In which I discuss how a lack of solitary reflection might hurt our ability to appreciate nuance.

I went down a bit of social media drama rabbit hole yesterday. Someone hinted at it in a blog that I follow, and I had to go and see what was going on with the same sick fascination as one watching a train wreck. I don’t really want to write about the specifics here (there’s no need to add fuel to that fire), but I was, as usual, struck by how completely black and white the situation appeared to a large chunk of the people posting about it.

I feel like society, or at least the chronically online part of society, has developed a huge “black and white thinking” problem over the last 10 or so years¹. There’s no room for nuanced opinions. No need to even consider that there may be drawbacks to some approach or policy that might look good on the surface, let alone try to mitigate them. You’re either 100% with us, or you’re the epitome of evil.

This all made me think about the chapter on solitude in Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism², and how important it is to have solitude to process and reflect on information. I’m wondering if the lack of solitude caused by our constant connection to social media is part of what’s causing this. Like of course there’s the part where algorithms prioritize highly polarizing content because it generates engagement, and the part where fringe opinions have the ability to organize into echo chambers that make them feel like their perspective is more prevalent than it really is. But there are plenty of people who engage with these platforms and are still able to discuss issues with nuance when they, for example, write about it on their blogs. Writing is, of course, often a solitary activity that encourages personal reflection, so these people may differ in that they are sometimes shutting out all of the inputs and reflecting more deeply on the content they engage with.

The theory does seem somewhat natural too me. If a constant stream of external information is being spewed into your brain and you never take time to process it, of course all you have is your knee jerk reaction to everything. Your brain is almost forced to quickly categorize everything as good or bad just to keep from drowning in the sea of information. It doesn’t have time to analyze the whole picture, and see that different parts may be black, white, or even shades of gray. It’s just black if it’s painted more dark and white if it’s painted more light.

Couple that with the fact that most social media sites encourage short form content rather than longer, more nuanced discussions ³. Almost all of the paintings are, in fact, presented in monochrome, and it’s easy to start thinking that the whole world must be that way too.