The Chronicle 2022

with your argument,” to, “I like you. Not sure why, but I like you.” And more worryingly “I hate you. I’m not sure why.”

million followers. But here’s the point. Whilst you cannot have truth without facts, just because you have facts doesn’t mean you have truth, let alone the Truth .

And then in the USA, we ended up with our first actor President, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura (the wrestler), and Arnold Schwarzenegger (body builder turned movie star) as Governors of Minnesota and California, and then, to cap it all, Donald Trump, a reality show star. This is not to say that these actors , and I use the word intentionally, were incompetent or unworthy of consideration for these responsibilities . I use the word responsibilities intentionally instead of roles , well not all of them anyway. Volodymyr Zelensky, who seems to be doing an incredible job as a wartime President in Ukraine, secured the job by winning an election as leader of a party called Servant of the People , named after the satirical TV show in which he played the part of a regular Joe who became President! It is to say though, that we need to be mindful of the fact that when we respond to messaging, we are experiencing in a particular medium, it will have been designed for that medium. Today there are 6.65 billion smartphones in the world and the average American spends five and a half hours a day on them. The phones and the apps that run on them are immensely valuable to, and useful for, those users. They enable them to stay connected to friends and families, to publish their own material, to create their own media brands (without middlemen, the gate keeping of editors, or the studio system) and to transact business without bank accounts. Millions of businesses have grown through them. Millions of jobs have been created with them. I believe that this has all made life better. Much better. I merely want to underscore, apologies, I have been in America for twenty years, underline how important it is for each and every one of us to THINK about how the messaging we are responding to is designed for the medium we are consuming it through. Nobody, of course, knows how to design it better than Elon Musk, when he’s using Twitter , a platform he may end up owning, but arguably already “owns” with 107 million followers. He is clearly a brilliant man, but he does not use Twitter to help us understand his ideas and theories. It is after all a platform designed for the articulation of ideas, opinions, and arguments for debate and discourse, as long as you can do so in under 280 characters. He, like all the other “successful” tweeters , uses it to do nothing other than provoke a reaction. To provoke a reaction. Any reaction. And we need to remember that when we are responding. I believe that we are in an era where facts have never been easier to lay our hands on. While I’ve been talking some of you have possibly been checking to see if I’m right about Elon’s 107 And it has evolved since.

Remember, I put pins in those words.

In 2008 Barack Obama was widely criticized after he gave a speech referring to people in Pennsylvania who “cling to guns or religion.” It was a fact.

He did say that, and you could consider it insulting to the people of Pennsylvania.

But what he actually said was this: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow, they are going to regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, anti-immigrant sentiments, or anti-trade sentiments as a way to explain their frustrations.” The truth…the truth… is that he wasn’t insulting them. He was saying that he understood them. He empathized with them. To get the truth you need facts, yes. But you also need context. We need to recognize that, in a world where our messaging is defined by media that are designed primarily for rapid consumption and reaction, we all have to work a lot harder to understand the full context in order to get to the truth, or at least close to it. Which brings me to the school rule and its genius: “Any act which might be considered disloyal, discourteous, or dishonest will be considered a breach of the school rule.”

Values based. Yes, of course: Courtesy. Loyalty. Honesty. I’ll sign up for those any day.

But the genius is in the words “might be considered.” Because the inclusion of those three words demands that we take context into account.

Any act which might be considered discourteous, dishonest, or disloyal will be considered a breach of the school rule.

Not a bad rule for life itself.

And now to put this all in context, I’m sure you all want to get out of here, so for me to prattle on any longer might well be considered discourteous.

And I don’t want to break the school rule.

So, I’m going to stop now.

Thank you for your attention.

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