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Hi, I'm Elsa. I'm a young student eager to discover the world and its intricacies. I love learning about the past and the present, so I can build the future at my scale. I also love reading and writing.
Is our focus on expressing ourselves actually harming us ?
May 31, 2018 6 years agoOur generation is more connected than ever thanks to social media, and nowadays everybody can express their opinions. This is a very good thing, and a very frightening one at the same time. Indeed, it's very heartwarming to see that freedom of expression is alive and well, but it is also scary to think that with the modern tools available, anyone can be heard throughout the whole wide world. That means that anyone can create a movement or redirect the purpose of one, which can have good as well as bad consequences. The ease with which someone can be heard is great because it allows anyone to make injustices known and undone, or make heroes known and rewarded. For example, a few days ago, a video of a man named Mamoudou Gassama saving a child by scaling a building in Paris went viral to the point where the French president Emmanuel Macron rewarded him with a medal. This story was quite innocent and had a happy ending. However, the freedom of expression that made the hero known also ended up making him hated, because in this new world, everyone wants to be heard by everybody, and what better way to be heard than by using trends ? Thus, the Parisian hero, who happened to be originally from Africa, became the poster child for pro-migrants militants, who are hated by a lot of people. And that's how, in an instant, in this world of eyes and ears, we started shouting over each other and using a hero as a scapegoat, when the only point of the story was that a child had been saved by a good Samaritan with great climbing skills. We should have rejoiced around that story, but instead we started bickering at each other because everyone wants to have the last word, even when there is no word to be had in the first place. That is what frightens me. My generation is so focused on expressing itself that it sometimes gives too much meaning to trivial or simple things, making actual meaningful things trivial themselves. And if we lost the joy of knowing a life has been saved in a couple of hours, what else did we already lose without realizing it, and what else will we lose if we keep acting this way ?
