Life Inside Social Networks - Urban Mood Magazine

It still astonishes me — and I have had years now to grow used to it — how easily people mistake their opinion for fact. Not quietly, not with the hesitation of someone thinking aloud, but with phenomenal arrogance: a self-proclaimed authority that nobody granted and nothing earned.

You show them. Calmly, patiently. Here is what the law actually says. Here is the document, the record, the plain and verifiable thing. And instead of the small human silence that should follow — the pause in which a person reconsiders — they double down. They keep arguing as if there were still another side, as if the facts were a matter of taste and being wrong were merely a position to defend more loudly.

So weird. It is the only honest word I have for it.

But maybe weird is too easy. Because this is not an accident, not a glitch in someone’s character. This is the air we breathe now. We have built ourselves a city — call it the timeline, the feed, the endless scroll — and we have moved in. And the first rule of this city is that everyone is right, all the time, about everything. Certainty costs nothing here. Doubt — the slow and rather beautiful work of changing one’s mind — has been priced out of the neighbourhood.

We used to say that knowledge was power. Inside the social networks it is the performance of knowledge that holds the floor: the confidence, the volume, the refusal to blink.

I keep thinking there should be an exit somewhere. A door back to the ordinary world, where a fact is still a fact and admitting you were wrong is not a defeat but a kind of grace.

This is the time we are living, right now. And we are living it inside.

by Massimo Usai