Bagrat Galstanyan, the bishop of the Tavush Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, made a very accurate comment immediately after our defeat in the recent war, saying that the winner was the social media reality in Armenia. I think this means that any event and any word is valued by how many “likes” or “loves” it receives after appearing online.
This results at least in two things.
First of all, the wording needs to be as flashy and castigate as possible, as the majority does not have the time and desire to go deep in evidence and logic.
And secondly, the value and meaning of their words are the last things one worries about. What does worry them, is after voicing their opinions they won’t appear among their haters, where a wave of abomination and insults will cover them.
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And in return, this derives from the unwillingness of people nowadays to act as independent thinking and analyzing individuals. Instead, they feel like they need to be a part of a group, which in their perspective is the majority: “The whole nation except for a couple of failed fellows thinks this way”. Rather than coming to self-standing conclusions, it is much easier to hide behind a known formula, which is a ready answer to everything and explains all the phenomena in life.
For instance, you scroll through your Facebook feed, and you see an image of the first president. You do not read the article, not even the headline, but you comment “you’re not gonna do well, Sergo”, the known “formula”, and by that, you solve two problems: first off, you get plenty of likes for your “snarky remark”, and furthermore you feel like a great national, political or public figure, who’s able to “put Ter-Petrossian in his place”.
This feature of the social media reality certainly affects not only internal politics but also external ones. Particularly, people are not interested in the actual content and the effect of the Lavrov-Mirzoyan debates on further events. The users online take one sentence from the speech of the foreign minister and get extremely delighted: “Wow, well done! You are so bold! That was a good dressing-down!” I have reasons to suspect that such sentences are only pronounced for mentioned reasons.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
