ELECTIONS: A SOMETIMES REASSURING SLAP IN THE FACE

or How Social Media Is Sometimes Just A Guy In His Underpants

I can’t find the exact quote but here’s the gist…

Social media makes things look alive.
It makes extreme views look like movements when in reality it’s just some guy in his underpants sitting in his mother’s basement.

Billy Connolly, the iconic Scottish comedian, said that.

He’s right.
Thank god, he’s right.

The Toronto mayoral election happened yesterday and Olivia Chow won.
I think she, and Toronto, will be fine.

What’s more interesting to me is how few votes some of the more, shall we say, fringe candidates received considering how much fervour and bluster they had on social media.

The election numbers showed, in no uncertain terms, that they are… well, fringe.

Huh. Who’da thunk it?

Social Media’s best quality is that it is, for the most part, an equalizer.
You can post something on social media and it is as ‘published’ as anything else on social media.
Celebrity matters but does not cancel out anonymity in social media.
An unknown person with a banger of a post can get more eyeballs than a Hollywood A-Lister.

That’s great.

But that equality comes with a caveat.
Just because you can hear someone doesn’t mean they deserve to be heard.

And yes, yes… everyone deserves to be heard.
Unless they’re spouting hateful self-serving garbage.
Then not so much.

Social Media is still relatively new.
Social Media IS real life but it’s also a din of voices, opinions and hot takes.
There is so much noise to cut through that sometimes only the extreme voices stick out.
Our brains get bombarded by the reasonable majority and tune them out, only to focus on the terrible fringe because… well… they stick out.

This is good news.

This means that we get alarmed by these extreme views.
We worry that they could be taking hold.
We fret over the notion that people are joining in and we feel like we’re surrounded and all hope is lost.

Then there’s an election and, if we’re lucky, we find out they’re just… fringe.

Not hard done by.
Not mistreated.
Not ignored.
Just fringe.

Terrible people are usually loud.
Usually the loudest in the room.
They’re loud in an attempt to convince others, and themselves, that they’re not terrible.

Sometimes loud terrible people can make it seem like there is an army of other loud terrible people in full support of them just out view.

Then we find out it’s just some guy in his underpants sitting in his mother’s basement.

We’re getting better at figuring that out.

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(Pictured: Author, not in his Mom’s basement, crafts another social media missive in his, albeit fancy, underpants)