Kimbrough: ‘We’ve stopped talking to each other’

Social media has become a divisive force, promoting isolation and animosity among Americans, said Dillard University President Walter M. Kimbrough, speaking at Clemson University’s Commemorative Service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.

“The social media sphere creates communities in one regard but it lessens our ability to engage each other face to face in the real world,” Kimbrough said, speaking at Clemson’s Brook Center on Tuesday. “We are desensitized to feelings and we easily damage relationships, and we can be just downright mean and nasty.”

Kimbrough said King, writing in 1967, foresaw how technology would make the world smaller, increasing tension.

Kimbrough quoted King’s book, “Where Do We Go From Here?”: “All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This worldwide neighborhood has been brought into being largely as a result of modern scientific and technology revolutions.”

The recent “very contentious election season” exhibited social media’s negative influence on public discourse, Kimbrough said.

Social media, with its ease and semi-anonymity, encourages impulsive and uncivil comments, he said. Online posts often serve as “anger-fueled intoxications that provide a quick high,” Kimbrough said.

“Technology has changed the way we interact and unfortunately has diminished our humanity,” Kimbrough said. “It has made us less civil, often reinforcing negative ideologies. There is a theory that states that otherwise adjusted people given anonymity plus an audience creates aggressive anti-social behavior.

“We find ourselves tearing each other apart literally and figuratively,” he added.

Kimbrough said one solution to America’s troubles lies in King’s emphasis on human connection and love.

“We have to conquer our social media addiction,” Kimbrough said. “We’ve got to leave our own bubbles and then we have to harness our instincts to serve.”

Kimbrough, an active presence himself on Twitter (@HipHopPrez), said that social media was a tool that could be used for good or ill.

Social media “offers an opportunity to either share love or hate instantaneously,” said Kimbrough, who has been cited as one of the top university presidents to follow on Twitter, according to a Clemson news release.

“The problem is that we’ve stopped talking to each other,” Kimbrough said. “In fact, sometimes we don’t even act like we’re human anymore.”

Social media has allowed Americans to become isolated from one another, he said.

The most characteristic feature of social media is not the act of reaching out, Kimbrough said, but the personal snapshot called the “selfie,” which was named the Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2013.

Kimbrough quoted President Barack Obama’s recent Farewell Address on the issue of social isolation: “For too many of us, it has become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhood or on a college campus or places of worship or especially our social media feeds surrounded by people who look like us and share our same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. Increasingly we’ve become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.”

Kimbrough, a native of Atlanta who now lives in New Orleans, the location of Dillard University, said Americans have become too attached to their smart phones, preventing face-to-face interaction.

“Observe yourself in a line for coffee or driving or even just going to the bathroom,” Kimbrough said. “Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down. Folks, we’ve got to leave our bubbles.”

Kimbrough said the key to changing attitudes is to observe what King called “unenforceable obligations.”

Kimbrough quoted King from “Where Do We Go From Here?”: “The unenforceable obligations are beyond the reach of the laws of society. They concern inner attitudes, expressions of compassion which law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify.

"Such obligations are met by one’s commitment to an inner law, a law written on the heart. Man-made laws ensure justice but a higher law produces love. The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men and women to obey the unenforceable.”

Kimbrough told the students that college was a perfect place to spend time getting to know and understand others, “getting out of your comfort zone and leaving your bubbles.”

He urged the students toward lives of service and activism that go beyond digital complaints on social media.

“Action is more than electronic commenting,” Kimbrough said.

Social media tends to short-circuit negotiation and reconciliation, but King’s idea of service always ends in reconciliation, Kimbrough said.

“Even though we disagree on an idea or concept, at the end we’ve got to come together because otherwise we can’t have a community,” Kimbrough said.

Kimbrough concluded by quoting King: “Together, we must learn to live as brothers and sisters or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”

Paul Hyde covers education and everything else under the South Carolina sun. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter: @PaulHyde7.