I love the internet. You won’t find a more staunch enthusiast of online communication than me. Hell, I even have a partner for 15+ years thanks to the internet. I have a rich social life in Amsterdam (and all over Europe, I’d add) that is organized through the internet, I get invited to speak at events because of what I write on the internet. Moreover, I sometimes get paid to write stuff on the internet. And I love doing so.
However, questions like the one I got today, expecting me to answer complex subjects on a brief blog post unnerve me. I resent this culture we have created where everyone is expected to have an opinion on every subject and where said opinions are supposed to be valid. I resent the oversimplification of topics that are inherently complex and historically charged to turn them into consumable sound bites. I would answer a simple question like “How do you feel about the islands?” or “What is your opinion about [current development involving the islands that just took place three hours ago]?”. Those are issues I am confident I can address because they are punctual, bound to a certain amount of words and a limited set of ideas to explain them. However, I am not going to sit down and scribble a half arsed post that would be a) incomplete b) marred in ignorance because it’d not be based on factual information and c) that it is meant to appease someone’s need for “opinions”. To answer accurately, I would have to devote hours to research the topic, put together a comprehensive list of resources where the person could go and get additional information and qualify my statements with additional data. That takes effort and it is the difference between being “intellectually lazy” and trying to be accurate. If I make a claim (i.e. the islands belong to X country), I’d better be prepared to support that claim. Especially because people’s lives are at stake on issues of colonial interventions and hegemonic powers. I do not take such issues lightly.
I can only offer brief and uninformed opinions on matters of personal taste (i.e. what do you think of the singer known as Adele?), but not on 600 years of history, a war I lived through and geopolitical issues that are central to the quality of life of entire countries. Asking me to answer so on Tumblr is either deeply inconsiderate or just ignorant. I don’t know which is worse.
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