“My dad says that the government is the best this country has ever had.”

“You muppet, what are you talking about? My dad says they ain’t bloody good at all.”

Pardon my poor attempt at trying to portray a ‘My dad is better than your dad’ in an English setting. I really just wanted to put ‘You muppet’ somewhere in there as I find it absolutely hilarious that you would call someone a muppet.

Anyway, I imagine it’s not too far off from when we were children in schools. In an attempt to win an argument in a discussion, we will make use of all resources available. We will start with the casual statement, argue with someone about it when challenged, bring our parents in, start swearing, and when all those things don’t give you the upper hand, we somehow end up in a brawl of fisticuffs.

The reason why we used arguments or stances from our parents is because as we were growing up, that was the main viewpoint inhabiting our mindset. Back then, social media and internet weren’t as prevalent to our arguments as either they didn’t exist or that we didn’t quite know how to use it to our advantage. I certainly didn’t.

However, now that we are armed with our smartphones and immersed in the stream of tweets, things have changed and we are far more capable of forming better arguments. Well, yes and no. Let’s look at the example again in this age, shall we?

“Everyone says that the government is the best this country has ever had.”

“You muppet, what are you talking about? Everyone says they ain’t bloody good at all.”

Haha. Muppet.

With global information at our fingertips, our mindset now has another resident other than our parents, which is that of the whole world. After scrolling through our newsfeed for an hour everyday, some of us feel we have a firm grasp on the perspective of the global nation and we couldn’t be any further from the truth.

What social and mainstream media offers you are pieces of truths and never quite the whole puzzle. There will always be a few jigsaw pieces missing without us realising it. There are an estimated 7 billion people in the world but there are only 313 million active users on Twitter and 1.71 billion active users on Facebook. We should also bear in mind that we barely come close to be in touch with all of those users.

Just because some people are louder and more noticeable than others on the social streams, it does not mean their perspective echoes those of the whole world.

Another interesting point to note is that some of us might be guilty of perpetuating deception based on the limited information we see. It is possible that when we read the ideas and opinions of our friends and popular idols, we think they ought to be true which leads us to retweet or share it with others. Our own friends see our own post and do likewise, creating a knock on effect. At the end, this creates a large pool of people that seem to be ingrained with a specific opinion.

Another phenomenon that could be affecting us is the Asch Paradigm which studies power of situations to influence of behaviour and attitudes. For example, if people don’t usually line up for the bus, suddenly there’s a large group of people started lining up one by one, would you line up or just hang around? Although the Asch experiments are still being debated, it suggests that many people will change at least the public expression of their beliefs when confronted with a group that disagrees with them (I took this right out of my Psychology textbook).  Not entirely about Asch Paradigm, this video by Studio C does take a hilarious take on it.

In this day and age, we sometimes are guilty of conforming our opinion to that of the ‘public’ because well, it is the ‘public’. Is it wrong to conform? After all, everyone is allowed to have their opinion in this free world. It certainly isn’t but at the same time, we should learn to discern the information we consume better and actually think through it. When there’s someone that disagrees with us, we don’t need to rain hail and fire (rain fire, that doesn’t even make sense. Thanks Adele.) upon them.

It’s good to be principled and stand up for what you believe it. However, allow yourself the humility to accept the possibility that others may be right. That allows for a far more fruitful discussion. I’m guilty of abiding by my opinion too much at times but upon further reflection, I always find that what the other person says holds some truth in it and it should never be discounted.

After all, do you and I ever hold the whole truth?