For those of you who do not already know, there is a rather large Facebook group of more than 13,000 members called “Wolfpack Students,” also known as WPS. Student Government originally created the page so it could foster the exchange of student ideas and gauge public opinion on policies (in the rare event that they actually create one of substance).
However, as most things on the Internet go, the group has morphed into another beast entirely. The most charitable description for WPS’s state of affairs is a public forum where people go to ask for advice, advertise for their organization or gauge opinions on current events. A more accurate depiction for the group is an inherently destructive environment where civil discussion and productive dialogue is replaced by discord and vitriol.
Take recent events for example: a “CMT v BET” party was hosted at The Retreat. For many, this was perceived as an act of racism akin to blackface parties; for others, the party should have been protected under freedom of expression. On WPS, many articles were shared, thereby setting threads ablaze with polemics. Rather than agreeing that there might be problems here on NC State’s campus with de facto racism or discussing issues of free speech, commenters split themselves into two camps.
Seeking to win the approval of the ideologically similar, the rhetoric used in these “discussions” amounted to no more than regurgitated one-liners and condescending straw-man attacks. Arguments were not waged to develop consensus or enlighten, but rather to stroke egos with confirmation bias.
Threads such as these are not dialogues in which the extensive nuances of a problem are discussed and analyzed in an effort to bring about a remedy to the issue. They are not debates in which evidence is presented in a systematic manner as both sides construct their arguments and respectfully critique the other side.
The culture of WPS has internalized a toxic metaphor as its model for argumentation: war. In an “Us vs. Them” bout of “wits,” strong, airtight arguments that put the opposition on the ropes emerge as victorious while the flawed individual is marked as an abject loser. This intellectually debilitating paradigm emphasizes tactics over content (since the only objective is winning rather than discovering truth) and exacerbates the dichotomy between “We” and “You” in a polarizing manner.
This isn’t news; we see this dialectical view of argumentation entrenched in other elements of our society. Our legal system is built on adversarial rhetoric with the notion of winning or losing defined by convincing the jury while our political process is firmly rooted in the tradition of fiery speeches made on the bully pulpit. The war model has dominated our rhetoric, so much so that it has come to define the way that we conceive and conduct ourselves within an argumentative setting. Thankfully, reality is mutable; we can change culture through our perceptions and actions.
We as a student body must hold our heads high and raise our standards for the quality of rhetoric that we use. We must work toward finding our community’s problems and discussing socially optimal solutions. And most of all, as the old adage goes, we shouldn’t feed the trolls.
