With today’s extensive availability of free information, it amazes me when people don’t fact-check themselves. Time and time again you can see people on social media and even the media itself using second-hand information that they clearly never bothered to research or double-check for themselves.

Often, if you have a question as to something's authenticity, a quick search can either yield you definitive results or at least bring up an alternative point to said argument. Social justice in the modern world seems to be based upon a “he said, she said” idea. We don’t look at facts and draw conclusions based on those. Instead, people tend to use facts that only function on the surface. A perfect example of this is statistics; while they can yield useful results to analyze these numbers, they’re oftentimes skewed from fact by drawing an improper conclusion. Another commonly used method is to use quotes from historical figures or contemporary sources, either using people that aren’t experts or taking the quotes entirely out of context.

The media itself is a travesty, something the modern American is probably aware of. However, when did it become acceptable to call out the media for skewing facts, using improper context, and being sensationalist when almost all Americans tend to do the same? Perhaps it’s simply human nature to get excited over topics, pick a side, and ignore contradictory facts. Human personality is based upon a specific set of biases built in throughout our lives, good habits and bad, and those tendencies endlessly control our ability to make unbiased decisions. While this is simply the way that the human mind functions, we shouldn’t let that rule our lives. Fighting the urge to fit into a specific group and let the group mentality make decisions for you is a natural social evolution that needs to be more prominent.

Rather than looking at the event through the glasses of your personal history, we should be able to look at the facts, analyze them, and draw reasonable conclusions. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to be so concerned with sensationalism and miscommunication. It’s inevitable that people would disagree, even when analyzing information objectively, but at least everyone could disagree like free-thinking adults rather than defensive children. Being able to discuss topics without any significant outside influence will probably never happen, even for the best of us, but one can hope.

We're in college. It's a time to learn, a time to experiment, and a time to mature. In doing so, we should be sure to leave behind as much social bias as we can when we view events. Viewing the world through a screen will only make us all more ignorant and cause more miscommunication. We all have a duty to making our world a better place, so rather than thinking we see it all, maybe we should be a little more blind.