British Columbia

I'm Indigenous Canadian and from my personal lifelong perspective ... things are getting better. They aren't a utopian level yet but we are moving towards that direction.

I think part of the problem that we notice about the internet and social media is that we all tend to gravitate towards rage, anger, hatred and fear way too easily because it is the most exciting and easy reaction that we can all understand and gain a bit of thrill out of. People do like to feel positive and happy with one another but there is a certain level of thrill and excitement at being around and seeing anger, fear and hatred. I'm guilty of it myself ... if I see a terrible car crash on the highway and I'm the first one to see it, I do have a morbid curiousity to want to see the gruesome real life details of what happened ... it doesn't mean that I enjoy that stuff or really want to see it - it's just the thrill and excitement of that curiosity because I would feel absolutely terrible once I saw and understood what I had just witnessed.

Hatred, anger and fear is what drives modern social media ... places like facebook, twitter, instagram, tik tok and all the rest all bank on hatred, anger and fear ... its the engine that drives these places. Once you get someone anger or afraid, they are more likely to engage and react ... maybe not for long but more often than not, they will react. Then that same person will move on and get upset about the next thing they see or read and on and on.

But like I said at the beginning, things in the world are better than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago. My dad was born and raised in the bush and when he visited modern cities and towns in Canada in the 50s and 60s, he was not welcome and treated harshly with a lot of blatant and open racism. In the 70s and 80s things lightened up and Indigenous people were able to work and live more freely. In the 90s when I was a teen, I went to school in the city and things were still rough but the racism was not as open and tolerated any more. In the 2000s, things were better still and being Indigenous was more normalized to the point where racist attitudes were fewer and far between. It doesn't mean it stopped. There was just a lot less racism than a generation before.

My point is ... in the digital world where we feel free to be disconnected from reality and feel that we can treat people in ways we normally wouldn't in public, many people are willingly open to be racist, arrogant and ignorant. But what I've found in the real world is that when you see and meet people in public face to face, they are more open, tolerant and capable of understanding one another regardless of gender, race, background or religion.

We are made to feel online that the world is a less open place whereas in real life from my own personal perspective, the world is a lot more open now than it was 20 - 30 years ago. It still isn't perfect but I think it is a lot better than it was a generation before.