Preserving Positivity

I spend a lot of time online, some of that time is spent by choice in my free time, the rest is by necessity as most of my disposable income comes from the internet. When you spend a lot of time online you get to see unsolicited opinions almost constantly, knowing these are opinions and not facts makes them easy to ignore but I do recognise that the ability to differentiate between opinion and fact is a point of critical thinking that people seem to be increasingly lacking.

When you can't tell the difference between an opinion and a fact it leaves you open to influence, some people make entire careers out of exploiting that point of ignorance, people we aptly refer to as influencers.

Whilst the cult of celebrity has a lot to answer for, attributing those opinions to a face and a personality, there's also a wealth of opinion based articles online that are not attributed to a face or a personality - I recognise the irony that this very post is an example.

One thing that I have always tried to underline in the content that I put out online is that I expect people to think for themselves, to make their own choices, and to consider their own knowledge and experience. I share my own for the intent of documenting and preserving my life experiences, both for myself and for others. I have said before I would continue writing this blog and making posts even if no-one read it because readership is a secondary motivation. I make money online from book sales primarily, I don't make money from this blog, it doesn't even have adverts on it.

I have been thinking a lot about the nature of online content especially following the events of this past week and the one thing that has really stood out is the fact that most content online is designed to preserve negativity. The News is the easiest example to illustrate this with as most people understand that when the news reports on something, it's usually something bad or something that went wrong. We don't watch or read news seeking positivity, we expect negativity; that expectation however extends to pretty much all content online.

When we look at social media there too we document the negativity in our lives, and the few sources of content like Instagram that attempt to document positive life experiences we have collectively agreed are disingenuous or completely fabricated. We look at people with "idyllic" and "idealistic" lifestyles as a point of entertainment rather than a point of documentation.

This isn't something unique to the Internet either, when you look at human history and everything we chose to document, there is an abundance of horror and negativity that is preserved in varying degrees of detail. Seek the preserved positive experiences of the past and you will find that search prove fruitless, to the point where the only counter media that preserves that vision of positivity is found in art history but even then the non-literary nature makes art subjective and harder to point to conclusively as a source or citation.

If we continue that trend, then 200+ years from now it would be easy to see why some might look back on this time period and say nothing good happened at all during this time, because even many people alive right now feel like that's the case.

In this context it's easy to see why beyond trending trauma the antithesis is found in meme culture, where little pockets of positivity spread like a virus through the populace for a brief moment before fading into obscurity. Memes exist because of the desperate desire to find something happy or humourous to shine a ray of light through the clouds of despair.

It doesn't have to be this way though, if we recognise that part of the problem is that we don't make an effort to document the positive life experiences we have then we can try to remedy that by making that effort, to preserve positivity, to share the things that make us happy more than the things that make us sad.

There's a lot I could say about all that has happened in the last week but I don't think there's much point as it would simply compound the negativity and amplify the message of hate that runs through it. Instead I want to focus on the positives wherever I can, even if they are few and far between, they are the memories I want to preserve going forward.