Today’s journal entry will be shorter as it is just an update for my March SDA plan.
By April 1st, my plan is to write a 450-word op-ed on the ideas expressed in my last journal entry. I also plan on submitting this to The New York Time’s student op-ed competition in hopes of becoming one of the ten winners among ten thousand entries!
Here is a link to the competition: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/learning/our-sixth-annual-student-editorial-contest-write-about-an-issue-that-matters-to-you.html?module=inline
My general thesis will be about how social media is intensely molding our morality (through the moral foundations) and we don’t know what’s coming. I am considering using a “natural selection analogy” about how thoughts (often radical like flat-earthers) get passed down/between many people on social media because the ease of access combined with our innate confirmation biases allows those thoughts to survive and spread. The counterclaim I think I will be refuting is about how social media makes people more diverse since they can follow different people and hence different schools of thought. My refutation is that people use social media as an echo chamber to further validate their own beliefs, so social media mostly results in the complete opposite effect: increased polarization.
The Moral Foundations theory is the the evidence I will be using to support my opinion (the thesis) and I should easily be able to get some NYT sources (as per the contest guidelines) because Dr. Haidt has written multiple pieces for them. I also want to get more numbers-based evidence (statistics) in some way because that is the common trend I have noticed in most of the past winners.
Towards the end of my op-ed, I think I will discuss the applications/examples of my opinion/thesis that we have already clearly seen. For example, callout culture, recreational outrage, etc. I’ll have to really condense my information into 450 words!
Lastly for my (likely short) conclusion, I want to propose a brief solution as a nice way to close things off. Perhaps something simple like: “Teenagers need to be more careful about what they are consuming. We must train ourselves to recognize confirmation biases or else we will contribute to a future where society is extremely polarized, with no sense of national unity.”