How Social Media and The Internet destroyed Science

 


During my high school education I had several teachers changed for the subject Language and Literature. It seemed to me that whenever we got assignment to write an essay, I was getting poor grades. Regardless of the effort I put, regardless of the teacher involved I was getting poor grades. Nearing graduation I confronted my current teacher, and asked her, rather boldly: Why did you give me a bad grade? She replied: I don't like your style. I was furious, I continued asking: Did, I miss the topic? Does the essay have errors, is something incorrect? Her answer was: NO, I just don't like it!

What I instantly realized was that in order to get a good grade, I was required to match her style. I was suppose to make the essay likable for one person specifically and morph my style to match hers. OK, I thought to myself, Literature is a subject of criticism, so likability matters. I can live with that. On the other hand, the same teacher would often glorify authors that were unique in their writing style? She liked Hemingway. Irony, anyone?

This is not the big issue though. Besides Literature, all Arts are like this, subjected to critics. That is OK. Its subjective to a high degree what is Quality and Nice to each person, and that is OK too. However, subjectivity should be contained within the Arts, period. 2+2=4 whether someone likes it or not. A poorly planned building will fall down, regardless of how much I fancy it.

The things are not like that anymore though. 

When the internet first came to be, the goal was to facilitate information interchange, educate and enable knowledge sharing. These days however, its used for girls ass ranking. Now everything is a subject to a Like or Dislike. That includes new inventions, science discoveries and laws of nature. For gods sake, there is a Flat Earth Society, and its going strong. Why? Because some guy didn't LIKE the FACT that the Earth IS round.

Social Media helps this likeability stretch to topics of everyday life and science, topics that should not be a subject of popularity voting. Topics that are facts, maybe unpleasant truths, but facts non the less. And everybody's voice matters right? Regardless of his/her expertise on the topic, his LIKE or DISLIKE tells Facebook which information to show you. Scientific information does not reach common people just because of this simple truth. Scientific articles do not have 2M likes, so Facebook algorithm will never show them to you. It will show you Nicki Minaj's ass, after all it has like 1.57M likes. 

The sad truth is that the internet is destroying the very thing it was suppose to spread and make available all around the globe: KNOWLEDGE 

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