Are you WOKE enough?
In an era of interconnectedness and unlimited access to information globally, there has been a rise in social awareness (Mendes,2011). This journey of eye-opening discovery of societal issues has created well-informed people but, in the process, unwrapped the narcissistic tendencies of the information age society (Vonk et al., 2013). Nichols(2017, p. 13) describes the current society as a narcissistic one; he claims that people internally believe they are “troves of knowledge with more insight than experts” the inability to admit insufficient knowledge on a social topic is a defeat most people are unwilling to accept making it harder for them to accept expertise knowledge.
What does it mean to be woke? Why is there a lot of pressure to be seen as woke? How does this diminish expertise?
The idea of being “WOKE” is to be a person that is consciously awake to societal issues. Kanai and Gill (2020) highlight that being considered woke in not necessarily a bad thing as society individuals should strive to be “culturally literate” This term “culturally literate” coined by Hirsch(1983) refers to the ability of a person to recognise and engage fluently in a specified culture. The real problem with cultural literacy in the age of social awareness is the immense pressure it places on everyone to be knowledgeable and well informed about issues, and this creates “fake cultural literacy” (Greenfold,2014) when people lacking knowledge on issues pretend to be informed or recycle ideas to avoid being perceived as ignorant their cultural literacy is performative. The rise of fake cultural literacy has roots in cancel culture.
“Cancel Culture can be defined as attempts to ostracize someone for violating social norms; the canceling strategy is mostly the use of social media with the objective of exercising real-life penalties” (Norris,2020)
Former Us Presidents highlights the problems with cancel culture.
Norris (2020) argues that cancel culture stifles diverse perspectives and limits intellectual debates, which in turn erases the importance of expertise. She further argues that the impacts on expertise are that people don’t care for experts as they don’t provide one fixed though on issues but provide a plethora of information with no conclusive answer, and this is not suitable for wokeness and cancel culture because people don’t want to be wrong and unwilling to perceive grey areas when it comes to social justice. Nichols (2017) shares similar ideas with Norris, stating that peoples’ scepticism of authority and distrust of formal politics combined with the self-righteousness and positive hostility within cancel culture has created the perfect cocktail for the downfall expertise.
Although Nichols frames a good argument towards the death of expertise, he fails to extensively explore the positives with laypeople critically interacting with meta-narratives and becoming socially conscious. Social Changes have brought about marginalised groups to question what is popularly considered “knowledge” as a social construct; with experts viewed as protectors of such knowledge can be detrimental to marginalised groups and society as a whole, thus the need to be “Woke.” Overall, wokeness might be seen as a threat to expertise as it opposes the stronghold experts have on knowledge. Still, the benefits of pressure on society to be more socially conscious could save our critical thinking abilities.
References
Bernstein, L. (2017). Pin on Women’s March 2017. Retrieved 6 January 2021, from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/463800461618859588/
Greenfeld, K. T. (2014). Faking cultural literacy. New York Times.
Hirsch, E. D. (1983). Cultural literacy. The American Scholar, 159–169.
Kanai, A., and Gill, R. (2020). Woke? Affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture. New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics,
Mendes, P. (2011). Social-driven internet of connected objects. IAB Workshop on Interconnecting Smart Objects with the Internet.
Nichols, T. (2017). The death of expertise: The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. Oxford University Press.
Norris, P. (2020). Closed Minds? Is a ‘Cancel Culture’Stifling Academic Freedom and Intellectual Debate in Political Science?.
Vonk, J., Zeigler-Hill, V., Mayhew, P., & Mercer, S. (2013). Mirror, mirror on the wall, which form of narcissist knows self and others best of all?. Personality and Individual Differences, 54(3), 396–401.
YouTube. (2019). Former US president Barack Obama, surprisingly, delivered a scolding targeting ‘woke’ call-out culture [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WmPRQ85hDE
