Social Comment

Friends, Enemies and Neighbors on Social Media

/ kevingdrendel / 1 Comment
Crazy couple screaming over chalkboard background

Depositphotos Image ID: 98171734 | Copyright: Vadymvdrobot

While the Godfather might have lived by the motto, “keep your friends close but your enemies closer”, most of us shut out enemies out and listen only to our friends.  This is human nature.

These thoughts occur to me as I reel from the flurry of angry and angst-ridden posts on Facebook. We have endured a particularly long and relentless period of political and sociological tensions dating back to the last Bush presidency. That the angst seems to have arisen with the rise in popularity of social media sites, I think, is no coincidence.

Regardless, the Bush, Obama and now Trump presidencies have proven to be fraught with angst and angry rhetoric from all sides. Social media was barely a thing when George W. Bush exited office, though he did exit office under a barrage of social media posts.

Considering human nature, and assuming that we all want our voices to be heard and taken seriously, perhaps we should think a little deeper about the difference between the voices of friends and enemies. Maybe an understanding of human nature, including our own, might help us to be heard better than it seems we are now.

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Race: Building Bridges in a War Torn Country

/ kevingdrendel / 2 Comments

 

Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s legacy lives on in his son. He says here in the video above that he is a bridge builder, as a swarm of journalists try to get him to burn that bridge. I am deeply impressed with admiration for his response.

If you haven’t watched the video yet, please watch it.

We live in a sharply divided nation that is polarized on many issues. Race is just one of them, but race is one of the most visceral and difficult of the issues we face. Dr. King preached a message of love and unity in a world of hatred and disunity. In some ways the world is little different than it was when he was alive.

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Should Google Censure the News?

/ kevingdrendel / 4 Comments

Some of the backlash following the surprise results of the recent presidential election is the focus on the bogus news sites that were ubiquitous on social media during the dreadfully long campaign season. I’ve witnessed many conversations and multiple, people of good faith ask: how do we know when a news source is biased?

The latest thing on social media is the creation of lists of fake news sites for people to avoid. Everyone seems to be eager to jump in as a consultant. LA Times,[1] AOL News,[2] US News & World Report,[3] Snopes,[4] of course, and many, many others. The problem is compounded when the people reporting the list of fake news sites are charged with being misleading.[5]

Even the answer to the question of what news sites to avoid depends on who is answering the question. According to Scott Shackford of, Editor of Reason.com, false news and satirical news sites are one thing, but slanted news sites are another.[6] If the news being reported isn’t false, who’s to say how slanted is “fake”? Continue reading →

Vetting the Truth in Our Echo Chambers

/ kevingdrendel / 1 Comment

I don’t want to live in my own echo chamber, but I fear that most people do. Judging by the things I see on social media, a large number of people hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see and think what they want to think, regardless of the facts.

We all have our own worldviews. Some try to keep an open mind, but all of us see through filters that we have either consciously or unconsciously developed. These worldviews are a visceral part of us. Our identities are closely connected them, whether carefully crafted or inadvertent.

It seems that most of us have hard time seeing past our own worldviews, and I include the media in that generalized statement. I don’t exclude myself from that observation. I have to fight (myself) to maintain even a semblance of an open mind. Continue reading →

Better than That

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I spend a lot of time reading and communicating with people on disparate ends of the political spectrum. I have voted Democrat, Independent and Republican in my life. I know where I stand on many (not all) positions, but my views have evolved over the years. No one party or generalization ever has represented where I stand. And that seems to be increasingly the case as time goes on.

I know that I am not alone in that.

But, we all have leanings, and we all tend to identify with one “side” or the other.  Actually, we tend to think in terms of sides, but the reality is that we all identify with certain ways of thinking, and those ways of thinking, which are varied, tend to fall on one side or the other of the political divide.

We tend to think that all the people who fall on “our side” think like we do…. But, they don’t. And we tend to think that all people who disagree with us are uninformed, lacking in intelligence and/or just plain “evil”.

I’m constantly amazed at the ways of thinking of the people who tend to “side” with me on some issue or another, but they don’t think anything like me!

For all of the communication channels that we have today with social media, I don’t think we understand each other very well. Continue reading →

Gangster Rap and What Matters

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Anyone who has read my blog knows that I often express sympathy with the plight of people of color in modern American society. Though I am white, a man and live in the suburbs, I have defended the right of Colin Kaepernick to protest, though I don’t find his protest to be very effective. I have urged my fellow Caucasians to try to see through the eyes of other people and not be so quick to dismiss them. I have written that we should try to understand what “black lives matter” really means.

I am not the person who should be writing about these things, perhaps. But, we are all people, right? If I can’t write about these things, what does it say about the ideal that we espouse as a society that longs for equality and justice for all and treats all people, no matter what race, nationality, gender or orientation, as human beings worthy of respect?

So I write about these things.

I specifically feel self-conscious about writing on this subject. It is not the world I know, but, I don’t hear people talking about it much. They used to talk about it, but not anymore. I’m talking about the influence of things like gangster rap on our society. Continue reading →