EOTO 3: Bobby Ramsey’s essay

Bobby Ramsey’s EOTO entry “Facebook as Catalyst for Improving Thoughts about the Candidates” offers a creative and unusual glimpse into the evolution of political belief as shaped partially through networked interaction. 

Rather than report from a distance, as most of us did, about a given topic, he chose the novel and fascinating approach of tracing his own discussions and debates about Sen. Barack Obama’s political positions. In the process, he mapped not only how his thoughts changed on particular subjects, but how anyone with a strong bias might go about testing the worth of their beliefs. 

If more people took Bobby’s approach to political discourse, we might not see as much political gridlock in Washington and partisan hostility within the nation. He doesn’t suggest people should drop cherished beliefs, he simply suggests that everyone could be a bit more curious, a bit more open to discussion. 

Of course, he uses Facebook as the laboratory for this investigation, and it comes off as a more than adequate communication tool in the right hands. 

As a neutral “public commons,” many have written about Facebook’s unique role as a meeting place of people and ideas. Bobby suggests it’s a persuasive one: 

“As you will see, I have undergone a personal evolution in my thoughts about the candidates — including two important stages.”

His personal evolution and perspective are a wonderful way of connecting with a topic. This reads far less like a research project and more like a personal journal. 

By saying that “I debated hotly, mostly parroting existing allegations against Obama that I now regret, and generally embarrassed myself,” Bobby takes a candid and courageous position that might make him vulnerable if he were a public person.

“Then I began to sense, through debate with one particular Facebook friend who is a pro-life Democrat, that there were holes in my argument,” Bobby writes, “or at the least, that Obama’s vote on the bill did not support the sweeping conclusion I had drawn.”

This showed that he was doing his own intellectual investigation as a voter, following through hunches and being open to discussion. That’s the true nature of debate, and he teaches us a valuable point here. Partison gainsaying – taking entrenched positions that never waver – is not debate in the true sense of the word. 

Bobby is not alone in his sense that something good is happening on Facebook. 

Mike Westling, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, published this 2007 paper that makes a very relevant point: 

“Facebook may be a better means of achieving a true public sphere than anything that has come before it, online or otherwise. The sheer fact that over half the student population at most universities is part of the network as well as millions of other people around the world demonstrates the utility of Facebook as an arena for communication. There is no other online community that connects members of real-world communities (geographic, ideological, or otherwise) in such an effective way.”

This paper makes a nice counterpoint to Bobby’s  EOTO essay because it digs even more deeply into the Facebook discussion phenomenon. 

In general, it shows how so many issues like this are vastly more complex than black and white interpretations of them would suggest. That is why they are so difficult to solve, even in the hands of such learned people as Supreme Court justices, who devote sensitive study. Again, however, this shows the benefit of making Internet connections that can supply not only wide-ranging opinion, but a nearly endless supply of information and articles to back up that opinion. 

Such phrases as “Now I was in a real pickle!” make Bobby’s self-referential writing a pleasure to read. It flows almost as a journal written by a man using an open mind to wrestle with challenges to his political convictions. 

Bobby’s five fears are clearly well-considered. And they deal primarily with the pitfalls of superficial thinking that can be so seductive on an Internet that often seems a mile wide and only an inch deep with intellectual curiosity. 

This is something we have discussed through our class at various times and it continues to ring true.

If online commentary is often anonymous and written by untrained people without basic journalism ethics, how can anybody read it with confidence at all? It begins to look like an infinite “letters to the editor” column without the benefit of knowing who or where a person is. Rather than illuminating the world with political discourse, the network is weighted with the flotsam of a million minds disengaged from each other. 

A great effort of integrating a difficult and personally challenging project!