Thomas Jefferson once said, “Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
(Without even the slightest deliberate effort, our generation has, by far, the opportunity to be the most informed electorate in the history of the world.
Let’s not be so quick to pat ourselves on the back. We have yet to do much with that opportunity. We play games on our phones, we make Snapchat streaks and we watch Netflix. Yet, without much effort, we are as informed, if not more informed, than even the most politically conscious of past generations. Information, especially from the political realm, has been forced upon us in streams, blogs, posts and tweets, as politics have infiltrated our social media applications, our television shows and even our sacred pop culture outlets.
For those of us who weren’t already inspired to be politically informed, our culture has made the importance of our vote difficult to neglect. And a glance at the headlines of yesterday’s Iowa Caucus calls us not only be aware, but to act aware, as we consume information—or what seems to pass as information but what may actually be misinformation, leading to disinformation, resulting in the over-informed becoming under-informed. The messages that have accompanied the weeks leading up to the Iowa Caucus come with a partisan bias, so we must be able to discern truth from fiction to differentiate factual information from personal agendas, to recognize what’s in the public’s interest and create a more interested electorate.
As the North Carolina primary election on March 15 looms in the future, the results of yesterday’s caucus are a less-than-gentle reminder for us to reflect on how to appropriately allow the constant bombardment of information in our everyday lives to actually settle in, affecting mindsets and effecting action.
We must get better at identifying misinformation as well as seeking out missed information. Election Day is not the day on which we should begin to sort out misconceptions or doubts or fill in gaps of information with out-of-context quotes or preferences based merely on the “smarter-sounding” names. Throughout the process of becoming primed to make a wise vote, we, the truly informed electorate, must take it upon ourselves not only to listen and learn but—more importantly—to analyze and integrate the information into our personal perspectives. A vote is a personal right, a responsibility that is owned entirely by the individual and therefore is a choice that, at the end of the day, an individual must live with.
But don’t be fooled. Even parenthetically speaking, this isn’t just election talk. I’m referring to all of the “information” that comes our way as well as to the need to exhibit judgment, discernment and even cynicism in interacting with what is presented to us as “information.” We live now, more than ever, in the age in which reality and fiction can be presented identically upon a screen. Look at the way Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” has polarized public opinion under the pretense of being an objective documentary but, under further review from numerous sources, is actually merely another piece of “agendized journalism.”
Entertainment often masquerades as information. And if that doesn’t sound familiar, reexamine the “information” that Donald Trump has trumpeted during his campaign.
The fusion of information as entertainment—and vice versa—into our regularly streamed, posted, blogged, viewed and read consumption of the outside world has its drawbacks. Even if we are able to differentiate valid information from misinformation, it’s an exhausting exercise.
The truth is, at times, many of us feel over-informed. From the moment we could communicate beyond coos and babbles, we were the generation who grew up “on the grid”—a phrase my parents would pull out during those days I would lose myself in AIM chats and Facebook poking wars. In that state, we are accessible to anyone and anything that desires our attention.
And so, over-informed, over-exposed and over-whelmed, we exercise the natural human tendency to logout. Delete an email. Scroll over a video. Turn off the television. Get off the grid.
And this is where our generation finds itself in a quandary. Because life off the grid, while it can be tranquil, proposes the strong possibility that we will miss out on a vital flow of information. Or at least the perception of such. We detach from the culture of over-information that is so accessible to us, we take it for granted and sometimes we even resent it for its intrusiveness. So how do we avoid being under-informed in a culture of over-information, a culture in which we have no acceptable excuse to be anything less than the “well-informed” people that Thomas Jefferson wrote of?
Very few of us will ever live unplugged. We’re drawn toward the stream of a steady, overflowing flow of information as well as prejudiced, opinionated flows that are presented as “information.” In my opinion—parenthetically speaking, of course—Thomas Jefferson wasn’t making a quantitative statement; rather it was a qualitative one. “Well-informed” doesn’t mean a wealth of information; it means a wealth in information. It is our task to sift through what is given to us for consumption in order to deem what is relevant, worthy and real.
With the upcoming elections in mind, both here on campus as well as in North Carolina, there’s an overwhelming amount of information to digest. But not all of it is actually edible. Information, unlike Cool Ranch Doritos, doesn't come with a label of ingredients and nutrients. These days, supposedly “informative” junk food looks just like the organic, truly good-for-you stuff. So it falls on us to create our own labels and make our own judgments, to come to our own conclusions after educated analysis rather than just mindlessly consuming and sharing information as if it’s all equally edible.
Don’t try to overeat. You’ll throw up on your ballot.)
Jackson Prince is a Trinity freshman. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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