A girl carries blankets as she walks past the site of a deadly explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, on Oct. 18. after agents of the state harassed him, humiliated him and prevented him from selling his wares. His desperate act spread across the web and the world. The Arab Spring had begun. All over the globe, people flocked to social media as a source of on-the-ground truth.Now, almost the opposite seems true.
What happened? The popular answer is that in the past decade, Silicon Valley’s most prominent platforms have turned from oases into cesspools. As a result, the way we look at these sites has changed, too.Once upon a time, we believed that social media would deliver the small-t truth: the nitty-gritty facts of any given situation. This wasn’t always wise. Thein 2011 were effectively live-streamed to the world with participant commentary.
But especially in moments of crisis, amid the fog of war, much of the time, small-t truth isn’t what we’re going to get. What we will almost always find instead is messier: an angle on the world not as it literally is but as people feelThis state of affairs is admittedly unfortunate for clearing up controversies or rebuilding a shared reality. The upside is that the sort of emotional and moral big-T Truth that the internetbroadcast around the world could go some way toward building more empathy.
Bouazizi, the man on fire in Tunisia, was initially said to be a college graduate reduced to selling fruit and then robbed of that, too. Eventually,that he hadn’t gone to college and might not have finished high school. Does it matter? He still set himself aflame.