When I was a young buck fresh out of college in the mid 2000s, I moved to South Dakota for my first job, far away from the South that I'd lived in for my entire life. I had no friends and no community there, and a small number of coworkers I had any meaningful interactions with. These coworkers introduced me to a game called World of Warcraft. For those unfamiliar, World of Warcraft (WoW for short) is a game that puts players in a big virtual world with monsters and factions and quests and treasure. The game also has guilds, which are basically communities with an in-game infrastructure for communicating and working together. I joined a guild and found a community to play the game with. I spent many hours on that game, as I didn't have a social life outside of it, and the guild became my community.
I have so many fond memories of playing back then. There were dungeons that were designed for groups to conquer, too difficult for one person to clear themselves. The guilds were often great at putting together parties of people to clear these dungeons. If you didn't have a guild, or if you didn't have enough people to put together a party at that time, you would go into big towns and shout out that you were looking for a group for that dungeon. It was challenging to pull together these pick-up groups, so you dealt with what you had. When you entered a dungeon, the team had to solve mechanics of various enemies in order to defeat them and obtain the valuable treasure they held. There was a lot of communal learning of what to do, what not to do, and a lot of educating new adventurers in this manner.
This was also in the early ages of google usage. People didn't spend a lot of time researching the game, watching videos, etc. I was one of the few in my guild that spent any time really researching various things, so my guild members frequently asked me questions about where to find certain things or how certain mechanics worked. I loved being able to teach them or have us discover together the mysteries of this giant world. When we explored a dungeon, at least some of the team was doing it blind, and we had to learn together how to tackle these challenges.
Around 5 years after the game launched, a mechanic called "Looking for Group" (LFG) was added that allowed a player to enter into a queue for a dungeon, and when enough people with the right roles queued up, a group was created to explore the dungeon in question. This eliminated a lot of the challenge of pulling together a group, which allowed people to frequently explore dungeons without needing a guild or a lot of effort. This also had the added effect that if someone didn't like the party they got stuck with through the tool, they could just leave and queue up for a new party, leaving the other players abandoned. There is a pretty overwhelming feeling among former WoW players that the LFG tool was the major negative turning point in the game's life cycle. Many people feel it destroyed the need for communities, leaving everyone to fend for themselves.
A couple of years after I started playing, I went to graduate school, and didn't have time to play anymore, so I canceled my subscription. The game underwent several expansions since then, and a lot of the original charm to me had been lost due to those expansions, so while I had fond memories and frequently desired to go back and play, I knew I couldn't ever really go back. Nearly a decade later, I found this place online where people had created a private server that was reproducing the game in its original state before all of the expansions. It meant I could play the game the way I remembered it, and I started playing again. So many memories came rushing back, and I was excited to find a guild and start exploring dungeons again. Without LFG to ruin everything, the value of community was back.
Except it wasn't. When someone didn't know something and would ask out loud how something worked, the answer would come back to them to google it. If someone didn't know how to fight a major enemy, they were told to go watch YouTube videos. No one seemed to have any interest in helping someone explore or experience the game. Questions or difficulties were ridiculed, and people would kick you off teams if you hadn't done your research first. This was when I realized that LFG wasn't what destroyed community in WoW, it was Google. It was the expectation that people wouldn't just play the game together, but rather you needed to educate yourself before you attempted to join with a group.
I find this to be a common problem in the real world today as well, especially online. There is a site called LMGTFY (which stands for "Let me google that for you"), that brands itself as "For all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than search it for themselves." I have been directed there after asking questions several times. The idea that someone would ask another person a question that can be googled seems to be an affront to our modern sensibilities. Somehow the opportunity to teach has gone from a privilege to a nuisance*. The act of one person asking another rather than asking a computer is seen as a problem. Questions have become a sign of laziness.
It's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing, but I think a lot of our modern discourse is shaped by this dynamic. Learning through asking questions to others is frowned upon, so when a question is asked now, it is looked at as a challenge rather than an opportunity to learn. This results in a dynamic where discussion is now framed in debate terms. A look at responses to posts on Facebook or reddit or Twitter shows that people are willing to take anybody's thoughts as an opportunity to debate or argue. Any opportunity to show someone they're wrong is jumped on. In fact, there is a joke on reddit that if you want to know the truth about something, just make a post stating a false fact about it, and people will rush in to correct you and tell you the truth.
Google continues to worsen this dynamic, as people can search for resources to support their pre-existing viewpoint to strengthen their ability to debate and "win" against people with other viewpoints. It has a siloing effect that I think is amplifying this debate-centered discourse, as now anyone who sees things a little different just becomes an opponent. If we aren't parroting the same thoughts to each other, then we are enemies. There's no opportunity to learn from people that think differently, as they are no longer our community. It's now us vs them in a battle rather than it just being us side-by-side with room for disagreement. We've all become caricatures because we are entities to debate rather than people to relate to.
Recently, abortion bans passed in several states, and it caused quite a stir online (and rightfully so). Any time abortion comes up, you get pro-life people calling pro-choice people baby-killers and murderers, despite the fact that most pro-choice don't like abortions either, they just want them to be an option. On the other hand, we get pro-choice people painting pro-life people as anti-woman, completely ignoring that pro-life people are struggling with the fact that they consider the fetus to be a living being, and so abortion is a loss of life which should not be flippantly dismissed. I am pro-choice, but I have many pro-life friends and family, and I know they struggle with the balance and trade-off (or at least most of them do). These people that I know do not fit the woman-hating caricature. On the other hand, I hate abortion and wish we didn't have it. I do not celebrate it. I may be pro-choice, but I still recognize the fact that the fetus is a living being and should not be flippantly discarded. I just think a woman should have a choice given the toll a pregnancy takes on her body and life. I do not fit the pro-abortion caricature.
We see this in modern Christianity, too. People go to
the Bible by themselves, determining for themselves what it says, and
then use their pet passages and interpretations to argue with anyone
else about it. I see this in conservative and evangelical churches, where anyone who doesn't agree with their interpretation is picking and choosing from scripture, ignoring what scripture "clearly" says. The truth is that progressive Christians read scripture too, and come to different conclusions, because scripture isn't as clear as we pretend it is (not to mention there is a lot of historical and linguistic context needed to understand some parts). I see a similar attitude from progressive Christianity, where people who hold to heavy dogma and detailed doctrine are considered judgmental and childish, ignoring that these people love scripture and Jesus and are just following what they think it says. I grew up in the conservative church, and the truth is that it is made up of so many people who give so much of their lives and love to other people because of their belief. I know several who would love to be more open, but feel like scripture (and thus God) is clear about a matter.
We are relational people, but we don't often learn in relationship anymore. We are expected to learn in isolation rather than in communities. Communities are viewed as spaces for argument and debate rather than joint education. We assume that all questions should be answered before the conversation starts, and if that's the case, there's no discussion to be had. Relational learning is a core Biblical concept, and for most of Christianity's history, scripture was learned in a communal environment. Questions should be welcomed and embraced, pre-determined answers should be viewed with caution. Academic answers are no replacement for personal ones. We need to be willing to educate each other and learn together.
*A caveat related to marginalization: I have heard the "It's not my job to educate you"
response from people on the margins when they are asked to explain
topics (related to the marginalized trait). I feel like this response
is mostly justified for two main reasons. First, a
lot of bad
faith actors say some awful things under the guise of "I'm just asking
questions". They want to turn the marginalization into a topic of
debate rather than learning (this is a tactic called sealioning).
Secondly, people who are marginalized are often on the margins because
they are viewed through a specific lens related to the cause of the
marginalization. When a person gets asked the same question over and
over because they have a specific trait, it can have an othering effect. When people
are expected to be a representative of their entire demographic, that
implies that the questioner views people with these traits as the same
rather than unique people with unique characteristics. As a person from
a major position of privilege, it's important for me to acknowledge
that there are legitimate reasons that people who are being oppressed
might not want to answer these questions, so I am not referring to this
particular case in the post.
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