Socratic Dialogue

F: Jenkins, don’t be fooled by the term “participatory democracy,” it has it’s limits and those limits are found specifically in the fact that in order to be “participatory”, we as a society must actively choose to participate and in order to be “democratic”, we as a society must care about the issues we are participating in.

J: Excuse me sir, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Society runs on the sole basis that we get a say in what we do, and that has now extended to participation.

F: You’re missing my main point. Let me try and explain this to you. The modern day participatory culture consists of a majority of absent-minded individuals, who together have created a network in order to interact with one another from anywhere in the world. However, this network consists of the people who now get to decide what we as a society deem as important because they hold all the power because of the sheer number of them.

J: Why is that bad though?

F: It isn’t always. It’s only bad when they don’t have everyone’s best interests at heart. The majority of people who make up this network don’t care about political issues, and are much more enthralled with this weeks’ most popular celebrities and viral videos, rather than the politics that keep this country, and every country around the world going. 

J: Maybe they aren’t interested in those issues though.

F: That might be the case, however because of the connectivity we have as a society with people from across the world, we now know politics from everywhere. We’re the most informed society to ever live, and we’re apathetic towards it.

J: When I go on Facebook though, I see my friend’s sharing information about causes in Africa and the Middle East. Does that really mean we’re not doing anything?

F: A simple share does nothing for the cause. If anything it creates the issues of “slacktivisim” which is another problem this country has been dealing with since the internet became a staple in all of our lives, specifically social media. By falsely inflating the knowledge of a cause, rather than helping it get solved, nothing will truly ever get done for it, leaving us feeling better because we feel like we did something but those dealing with the problem without any aid.

J: So why don’t people just become more informed in the important issues?

F: It’s not that simple. You can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do, and if it’s not right in front of them on their computer, they’re not likely to do it. Twitter tries, but there’s limits to it because of the 140 character limit and the restrictions imposed on it by certain countries, such as Iran during the protests that were going on there during 2009, cutting off a source of information to a group of people who won’t get it any other way. Facebook, while arguably the leading social networking site, makes it hard for politics that aren’t main stream to be discussed, so if you’re not the president, it’s difficult to start a discussion. YouTube is possibly the worst, with most people going to the site only for entertainment from companies like Sony and Universal, who not only don’t care about what’s going on in the world, don’t want people watching their viewers to care what’s going on in the world because that would drive people away from their videos out of sheer knowledge there are more important things going on in this world than music. 

J: I guess that makes sense. However, we still make that choice to go to those sites and choose what we see. If people don’t want to look at certain things on certain sites, isn’t that their decision?

F: Of course it is, but that’s leading to a group of uninformed, overconfident people who think they know about what’s going on in the world when all they know about an issue fits in a status. Worse than that, most people avoid that type of knowledge all together based on my research. There’s a reason politicians have less followers on Twitter than Kim Kardashian, because no one cares about what the politician has to say and people are desperately hoping Kim Kardashian says something worth talking about. The best case scenario is that one of these people with these absurd followings talk about an issue and create a conversation with some meaning deeper than who wore what the best.

J: So what about you, sir, do you stay off the internet? Do you not take part in the “participatory democracy”?

F: Of course I do, it’s impossible not to. It’s how you participate in it that matters. You choose the important things to follow, like, and watch, never taking anything for face value and create a conversation rather than just stay docile behind a screen.