The Rise of the Keyboard Warrior and the Downfall of Discourse

We all have that friend or that family member.

You know them as the awkward political voice on your timeline that is always re-posting or sharing videos, photos, and graphs pushing their political agenda. More than likely these social media advocates have been for/against Trump or for/against Bernie and they have been so, in an ardent and quite vocal way. 

They flood your timeline with the "truth" and wish to "open your eyes" to what is going on. You watch on, almost like a beautiful car crash, as they fight in the comments section with people of opposing views creating a demolition derby of partisan bias. These keyboard warriors are on the prowl daily looking to pump up like-minded supporters and "change" the mind of opposition view holders, but honestly what good are they really doing?

Now me from six years ago would praise this kind of social media political awareness. I can lament being a political science major six years ago and talking with a close buddy of mine about how apathetic the public was to politics and current events.

There were whole classes and discussions on how to re-energize the American public to be involved in the political process.

I remember asking friends who they were going to vote for in our state and national elections, and they would look at me as if I just asked them to give me their wallet. People told me politics was boring, it wasn't entertaining, it just wasn't for them.

I heard every excuse in the book that boiled down to the same premise: politics was an uninteresting waste of time. Now here we are six years later and I almost wish we could return to that time. 

I say that because the current brand of political involvement I see, on social media especially, is one of partisan divide and complete ignorance of a middle ground. We really have become political creatures in the sense that we have devolved to the state of animals in the wild: we travel in packs, we often engage in disputes over territory, and we often roll around in the filth and enjoy it.

I love the creature allegory for the modern social media political activist, but a more apt metaphor is that of the keyboard warrior. A person who lobs personal and ideological attacks at others behind the comfort of a computer screen and a keyboard. 

The rise of social media has made it so easy for this kind of partisan and ideological attack to proliferate.

Think long and hard about this question: how many of your social media friends do you actually engage in-person on a weekly basis?

 The number is likely quite small, yet here we are with hundreds upon hundreds of friends on these social media sites. This makes it even easier to engage in vitriol and personal attacks because we are not seeing these people on a regular basis. We are merely two profiles battling in a never-ending comment war over who is right. These modern keyboard warriors engage in the mantra of "listening with the intent to respond, not the intent to understand." 

Now it would be too easy to just blame social media on the rise of the keyboard warrior. If I were lazy, I would just wrap a bow on this post by saying something about avoiding the trolls on social media and instead engaging in discourse in person, but that isn't how this is going down.

First off I know no matter what I say, in-person debate will not increase or be affected in any way. We are programmed now to use the internet and our social media profiles as our personal soap boxes, each shouting at each other no matter how many times we have heard the message. But I also want to explore another side to the rise of this partisan warrior nature that explodes in quick bursts on social media: the media. 

I could not write a post about the modern political nature without discussing the role of the media at least just a little bit. I often hear the biggest curse of the modern media is the rise of the partisan networks.

We all know them by heart now: Fox represents the conservative interests, MSNBC the liberal interests, and CNN is off in the middle of nowhere doing their own thing. We've known this for year's now and it is no longer a shocking component of the news cycle or of modern culture. What I want to highlight instead is the rise of soundbite journalism.

The rise of soundbite journalism, for me, is the single biggest factor in the media's influence on public partisan discourse. Candidates in today's election cycles are rewarded for delivering quick barbs and one-liners that networks can flash on replay throughout coverage and across social media. Every network and journalist craves the 10-20 second viral quote or tagline that they can lure viewers with during top of the hour segments or use as clickbait.

This election cycle we have a true connoisseur of the craft in the form of Donald Trump. He understands perfectly the culture of deriving stories simply from a single line of text or a lone statement and inevitably we become a reflection of what our political environment embodies: a society of one-liners and quick hitters. 

David Aronchick of Huffington Post  came across a rather startling statistic to reflect this troubling trend in politics:

"In the political run-up to 1992 presidential election, a professor at the University of California published research that proved the length of the average television sound bite had dropped from 43 seconds during the 1968 presidential election to just nine seconds during the 1988 election. A 2011 study[1] published in the Journalism Studies Journal found that the typical political soundbite had shrunk to just eight seconds!"

Michael Dukakis even famously lamented during the 1998 Presidential election that "if you couldn't say it in less than 10 seconds, it wasn't heard because it wasn't aired." It is with this movement towards soundbites and quick recaps that we have lost the essence of the campaign and what political discourse used to be about: in-depth discussion about what separates not only candidates from each other, but how each party will outline their plan for the future.

 Today though we have replaced it with candidates discussing the size of their "Vice President's" if you catch my drift and other inane, sophomoric topics that networks can encapsulate in quick soundbites. 

This transition to soundbite journalism encourages partisan attacks not only among the candidates but the American public as well. We have become as childish and attack-minded as the candidates we regularly see trading barbs across the evening news except we trade the same barbs across social media.

Regularly I see the terms "liberal", "conservative", "democrat", and "republican" thrown out as insults and derogatory terms now instead of honest adjectives. It is when we see this combination of attack-minded discourse from our candidates and the available medium of social media that we truly become these rabid keyboard warriors.

That is why the current version of myself is so disappointed at the politically active members of our society.

We went from a nation of apathy to one of attack.

I use to feel safe in posting my political viewpoints to any form of social media, but now out of fear of never-ending debate and attack I rarely ever post. The old me desired this forum of active political discourse where the many were eager to discuss politics, the current me wishes we had never evolved, or devolved, to this point. We have slipped back into the primordial ooze of political discourse, closer to another Burr shooting a Hamilton than to a founding father figurehead like a Washington.

Until we ascend past the ranks of the keyboard warrior, until we can engage in honest discourse again, we are doomed to stare at candidates best resembling that of an internet comments section and are doomed to endless shouting at each other until our CAPS lock wears out.