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Google-search opinions hurt democracy - A commentary

KERA 90.1 commentator James Mardis
KERA 90.1 commentator James Mardis

By James Mardis, KERA 90.1 Commentator

Dallas, TX – I teach a three week summer course for gifted middle school students titled, "Public Discourse: Students Impacting the Public Agenda." It's designed to awaken these young minds, being geared toward leadership, to the Socratic ideal of knowledge before power. They bring opinions, and we look into the validity of those opinions. We also discuss how those opinions affect their relationships with peers, parents, religion and society. This is always the best part of the class, because they assume that everyone will simply agree with them based on the relationship that they share. Soon, they discover that we are defined by something more involved than mere kinship.

Young people have adopted media's message that "image trumps everything." Looking the part is better than being the part. They also believe adopting overheard opinions is the same as formulating, through research and application of their belief system, actual opinions. Given the assignment to validate their position on abortion, for instance, a student will go to the search engine Google and type the word "abortion." After a few minutes of staring at the millions of websites offering some slight relationship to the word, they select a few pages to view, then print a few pages to cite. They justify their effort with claims that the web is a valid source of information. What they think of as knowledge is merely regurgitating immediately available data. The class also debated claims that the Bush Administration misled America into the Iraq war with questionable information on weapons of mass destruction and the ensuing U.S. Patriot Act legislation. As with the internet search, our next step was to discuss the consequences within a society that lauds and detracts citizenship on biased or cursory knowledge.

After the September 11th attacks, we were deluged with calls to action to combat terrorism. Those calls to action were like a Google search with "terrorism" as our search word. What came back were the one-sided descriptions of blinding fear. We discovered that terror has no restraint, race, economic class or border. Terror was McVeigh and Malvo, trained soldiers. It was the American Taliban, and it was hidden in sneakers. Terrorism was so near, in fact, the government told us to spy on the guy next door. Like a bad web search, we saw the hottest, trendiest examples of what was possible, then we stopped asking questions.

If America had begun with the search words "liberty" or "citizenship," we would have gone down a different path altogether. Everything from the stories being covered in the daily press to the defense of our borders and peoples is supposed to be a consequence of informed, reasoned actions and laws. Instead, in this time of terror, we are asked to put blind trust in the government's direction and dominance of our liberties and even our relationships. But, we already know blind trust brings the worst consequences of all. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's "Red Scare" on communism showed that biased and cursory knowledge of the true threats we face could lead us into guilt by association. Blind trust like this gave us the Tuskegee syphilis study on black men, the dot-com debacle, the Y2k scare. "If we knew then what we know now" is not just a turn of phrase. It is a lament.

Citizens should not blindly trust powermongers to do some innocuous "right thing," because trust takes away the opportunity for dialogue. After all, when President Bush said, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorist," there was suddenly no middle ground. It is from the middle that we begin to weigh both sides of the debate and make decisions on how to advance as a nation, society and community...citizen.

 

James Mardis is a writer from Dallas.