Performative Enlightenment
How smart can anyone really be if all their information comes from social media? The second I say, “I saw this video on…” I immediately want to crawl into a hole and die. The shame of being chronically online is almost as crushing as the shame of not having read a book for fun in over six months. But then, ah, sweet relief, whoever I’m talking to says “yes,” and suddenly we’re swapping videos for 45 minutes, just memes and hot takes about world news, none of it fact-checked and none of us caring. We pass information like a shared cigarette three drinks in. And we all know: drunk cigs don’t count. So does our news not count either?
I suppose the real question isn’t whether we can trust social media to report what’s going on in the world, but the less popular question of what—if anything—we actually care about. What specific niche chaos makes it past the scroll and into our psyche? There are, conservatively, nine million crises at once. It’s impossible to track what the “top story” even is. So instead of tuning in to NPR on your way to Target where you’ll dump money into the very capitalism the radio just criticized, which just made you question your moral compass, you can scroll through a catered list of accounts you follow. A 24 hour stream of issues catered to your flavor of digital dopamine.
We’ve hit a cultural moment where the truth feels almost optional. What matters now is the sell. Selling what, exactly, I’m not sure. An image? A narrative? A performance of being informed? It’s like life has become a script, and we’re all actors, terrified of forgetting our lines. Because God forbid someone says something we haven’t heard about. We all have to be “in the know.” Even if what we know is nonsense.
But here’s the twist even in all this noise, all this chaos, all this performative knowledge-swapping we are in fact learning. Sort of.
Because social media, for all its flaws, does one thing remarkably well. It connects us. It creates a web of shared references, fast feedback, peer-to-peer exchange. In education and training environments, that kind of interaction is gold. Suddenly, a student in a small town can message an expert across the globe. A TikTok explainer can break down a complex theory better than a textbook ever did. A meme can become a mnemonic device. A group chat becomes a study guide. A Discord server becomes a classroom.
Networking, once reserved for awkward conference coffee breaks, now happens in comments and DMs. You can share your work, ask questions, crowdsource answers, and get real-time support.
The news we find online is the only news we can trust. Not because it’s been vetted by a panel of experts in blazers, not because it’s sponsored by legacy media with a reputation to uphold, but because it’s raw. It’s shaky iPhone footage. It’s someone filming through tears. It’s the caption, “this is happening where I live.” It’s not polished, it’s not packaged, it’s not produced. It’s just real people, showing what’s going on.
We’re not trained in the art of propaganda. We weren’t hired by a network. Most of us have nothing to gain by posting a video of a protest, a flood, a police raid, or a grocery store with no baby formula. No agenda. Just urgency.
That doesn’t mean everything is true. But it feels closer to the truth. Because the everyday people filming and posting and sharing—those are the voices of this era. They are the reporters. The whistleblowers. The documentation team of the digital age. And yeah, maybe they edit their videos. Maybe they add a trending sound. But they’re not spinning it to protect a government or a corporation. They’re just trying to be heard.
So no, I don’t always trust the news. But I trust the girl who filmed what happened outside her apartment. I trust the guy livestreaming what the headlines ignore. I trust the comment section with firsthand accounts. I trust the people who aren’t paid to say it—because they’re usually the ones saying what matters.
Maybe that’s the new literacy we need. Not just reading between the lines, but watching between the posts. Learning to tell the difference between the scrollbait and the signal. Because sometimes, the most honest thing you’ll hear all day starts with, “So I saw this video on…”