Social Media And The Struggle For Intellectual Humility

By Andrés Muñoz

Human beings love to debate. As sentient beings who now think and reason after millions of years of evolution, we’ve reached our current point in history thanks to exploring ideas and perspectives. Whether it was Greek philosophers, Buddhist Monks, or Europeans during the Enlightenment, passionate discourse and rhetoric opened new doors that humanity could explore and advance through. 

Cut to 2022: what if these doors of perception were not shown by a real conversation between understanding individuals but created by a social media network’s algorithm? Where would they take us? Are we still wanting to engage in discourse with people with different opinions? Or are these social networks pigeonholing us into marketable chunks of humans that think alike and want to stay only with those we agree with? Let’s check out social media’s effect on us having valuable conversations and see what we can do about it.