Presidential Election 2016 and the internet--the real winner

The last year has been difficult to watch, and the last few months even more so. News and quasi-news organizations have been bombarding my email with stories about the people vying for our presidency. It has been anywhere from difficult to completely impossible to screen this information for accuracy. Lies and information taken out of context and repeated until it seems true has been part of both party's rhetoric. The whole field of potential candidates were infected with it before the primary elections.

The emotions have been high, too. By the time the election finally happened on November 8th, we had a comic book villain straight out of the Batman movies running against Satan in female form. The outcome has left people deeply sad and frightened, even people who voted for the winner. There is hope, too, and kindness and gathering together. There is huge uncertainty.

I've been alive for 13 presidential elections, and this one was really different. This is partly because of an increasing gap between rich and poor, fallout of the financial crisis of 2008 and the changing international landscape, but the biggest change has been the growth of our use of the internet and social media.

Most people like to believe that the reason for our recent presidential election results can be found in the thoughts and behaviors of human beings. It feels good, in the face of a frightening and unexpected event to imagine a way that it could have been under our control, that next time we could anticipate it and make significant changes.

As human civilization has evolved, so has our ability to communicate complex ideas. Language, then writing, then printing presses, then telegraph, radio, television and now the internet, links us and allows us to learn from each other and share ideas and feelings and events. With the internet, and now our mobile phones which are ridiculously powerful computers in our pockets, we nearly share a common brain. Even the progressively smaller portion of the population that isn't directly connected via a computer is indirectly connected if they read a newspaper, watch a TV or even talk to a neighbor.

The internet of news is a small part of the entity that is the entire internet. Items that people like to look at rise to the top of any search and appear prominently on Facebook or other sites where people share information. This could be a cute baby dancing, a way to lose weight or a delicious news story, such as a powerful person behaving poorly and getting caught. We will choose to look at these things even if they are out of context, don't work or aren't true, and they will become a larger proportion of what we see. We will be less likely to look at things that are complex, nuanced, and present more than one side of an issue. What we click on is what we get.

There is actually quite a market in made to order "news". Paul Horner was featured in the Washington Post, explaining that the lies he successfully spread via Facebook and other sites around the elections were really just satire and made to be taken as such. But readers believed that people were being recruited and paid $3500 to protest at Donald Trump rallies (he invented this and even created a fake Craigslist advertisement to back it up.) He made money on stories like this, and others such as that the Amish had decided to vote for Trump. Ads on these fake news sites make a good salary for a person with a good imagination. I won't link the stories because that would, in a small way, add to the viral nature of the stories and Paul Horner's livelihood. In fact, by posting a link to the Washington Post article, which links to Paul Horner's stories and his ads, I have contributed to his success, and perhaps the success of fake news in creating misguided popular sentiment.

Humans are amazing. We have created a way to communicate instantly with a group of friends on opposite sides of the earth. But with this we have power to make fiction nearly real, with potentially disastrous consequences. On the medical side of things, I have noticed that the ability to be completely absorbed in communication that requires nothing but small movements of the hands has contributed to an epidemic of diabetes and obesity. Although entertainment that doesn't require the use of resources may be an important aspect of life in a resource stressed world, I don't think we are ready for what we have created. We are more than what we have let ourselves become. We have abilities to connect via touch and smell and eye contact. We care for each other deeply. We have let ourselves become communication nodes made of flesh in a supercomputer which does not have our best interests in mind.

Personally I am being a bit childish about all of this. The internet has let me down. It has sucked up my free time and made my patients fat and has elected people to the country's highest office based at least significantly on information which is not true. I read that we need to take to social media to unite to fight for causes I believe in, and I am questioning that. Facebook is no longer on my phone. I think several times before clicking on links. And I realize that this is a piddly and ineffective response to a problem that is huge and unacceptable. There has been tremendous good that has come out of our ever more powerful abilities to communicate, but presently I am very angry at the internet and I refuse to play.