My views on things often differ from those in my social circle. I am often bombarded with article links and videos from people with no words of their own attached. It is very easy to send a link. It takes a bit of effort to form a coherent paragraph expressing a single thought.
I would describe this kind of communication as lazy and not very good. I am sure others experience this often as well. I am wondering if there is a proper term for it, or if it is worth trying to coin a term for it.
Internet Tamarians
Sokath, his eyes uncovered.
Riker, his seat mounted.
Illiteracy. People are addled by the constant barrage of propaganda, most of it in the form of advertising, its characteristic obsessions with superficial appearances, its constant reliance on lazy stereotypes, its overestimation of the worth of stupid jokes dressed up with a clever veneer, and its insipid pandering to the lowest common prejudices. Intellectual laziness and sloppy thinking based on learned heuristics rather than any kind of logic hace come to dominate our politics, our workplaces, our social lives, our whole culture. It has begun to sink in at an unconscious level and undermines the foundations of our socially constructed worldviews. It is the final victory of the Spectacle, the complete divorce of humanity’s understanding of its own situation from the reality of it.
On the other hand, I like memes. They’re funny.
I’m not sure what you would call them, but you wouldn’t call them “critical thinkers.”
Because a critical thinker would have their own thoughts about links they wanted to share. They would be willing to discuss why they thought a link was important, and the issues they thought it touched on.
People like this seem to live with very little skepticism. I read a lot of news sources where I feel I can trust them on certain issues and not on others. I can trust the New York Times on a lot of things, but I also know that they tend to cater to a more wealthy audience and that their foreign policy ideology clashes with my own. That doesn’t mean they only peddle warmongering class-war bullshit, although they do produce a lot of that. They do also produce a lot of solid, thoughtful reporting, but it still requires skepticism on my part in reading those articles and not just taking them as “gospel.”
A meme is too short and simple to really get into complex ideas, and as such, memes are good for sharing simple, accessible ideas, but very bad for sharing more complex themes. Once again, lack of skepticism and favoring simple ideas as opposed to understanding the complexity of the world requires more complex understanding of it.
What’s the opposite of “critical thinking”? Biased befuddlesness maybe?
I’m pretty sure the opposite of “critical thinking” is “free thinking”, at least based on all the “free thinkers” I’ve spoken to. I assume it’s short for “free-of-critical-thought… thinking”.
Do you invent all the words you use to describe things?
Language evolves. Doesn’t mean people are getting less intelligent. But thinking that does make you out of touch.
My views on things often differ from those in my social circle. I am often bombarded with article links and videos from people with no words of their own attached.
I have no term for these people (nothing nice, at least) but the term for your social circle might be “echo chamber”, and it seems to be theirs.
You could verb meme. They memed. She is memeing. He will meme.
Another descriptive candidate could perhaps be ‘echoing’. It evokes a rapid repetition without processing. Other uses work nicely too – e.g. “the notes of the student echo the notes of the teacher, not having passed through the minds of either”. Or “they simply echoed the meme they had received”.