WATCH MY DOCUMENTARY HERE: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E3IpmgpGmGvY3TFH6D-d3QhOzEIwobEv/view?usp=sharing 

 

My documentary video, Is UChicago Doomed? Students Confronting the End of the World, puts average UChicago undergraduates under the spotlight. While during the course of the quarter, we have been lucky enough to hear from leading experts, read cutting-edge work, and engage in thoughtful and fruitful discussions, most people never get that chance. This documentary endeavors to explore the effects of this reality on ordinary students. How are people viewing doom? How do people think about the future? How do people think about the state of humanity? These are the questions that everyone has thoughts on, but students, with their youth, media exposure, and viewpoints on society, are sure to have a unique set of stances compared to children, middle-aged people, millennials, or elderly folks. I sought out to see if this is true and, if so, what I might be able to determine. 

 

Motivation

 

Students provide an interesting demographic from which to approach this topic. On the one hand, college-age kids are educated. They are likely to know something about the issues and risks that face—and maybe potentially doom—human society. In addition, their youth means that they are the people about to enter this world. Does concern about what is about to be inherited reverberate around young communities? Furthermore, as the generation that is likely going to have to solve these issues, how does the college demographic view their own ability, likelihood, and interest in fixing the existential dangers that threaten humanity?

We have heard from experts. However, many have been somewhat old and, by extension, somewhat removed from the genuine burdens that are going to befall those currently in school. Their worries and expertise, however valuable, don’t mirror the young people who have lots on their plates not just now, but also in the future. I assumed that this would muddle the calculus around “doomed-ness.” I wanted to see what I could find out.  

In addition, students outside of class don’t have exposure to the same degree of thinking that we do. They haven’t had the conversations, read the work, or contextualized the lessons in the same way that students in “Are we doomed?” have. I thought it would be valuable to be able to compare a more risk-conscious viewpoint (my own) that has developed over the length of the course to the ordinary college student who may or may not be aware or scared of the risks we have discussed.  

In addition, I consider UChicago students to be pretty bright. I thought that they would have a pretty comprehensive knowledge not just of what was happening in the world, but also of the dangers that existential risks pose, the methods that might resolve these problems, and the degree to which young people generally are ready to solve them. 

 

Reasoning

 

In order to go about investigating the mindset of students, I reached out to several contemporaries of different fields, backgrounds, interests, and temperaments. I set up over a week 6 different interviews in which I asked students a fairly uniform set of questions. Primarily, each interview traced the following list of questions: What concerns you? What do you think young people are concerned about? What are the biggest threats facing humanity and society? How do your concerns and the concerns of other young people reckon with those threats? Do you think (if not mentioned) global warming/AI/mass social media/nuclear/bio is a threat? Is humanity/society doomed?

Of course, as each conversation (and that is what they were, conversations) evolved, the interview drifted around. I tried to strike a balance between letting the students on camera say what they actually thought and correcting/guiding/rephrasing their thought process. At times, this meant letting them get away with blatant falsehoods which, even in the narration of the film, I let slide. The movie is not about me giving my opinion, but analyzing what I saw from others—the viewer is supposed to use what they see to determine if they might agree with me. 

With all the interviews in hand, I set to work trying to find the story they came together to tell. I found something I certainly did not originally intend to…

 

Implications

 

The actual discoveries I made were quite interesting, and not really what I expected. The overarching concern of all those I interviewed was not of an individual crisis or risk, but of the qualities of humanity itself. My subjects feared, in general, that social media, news, partisanship, and the online ecosystem, in general, had both indirectly and directly harmed the empathy, humility, and kindness required to tackle the problems head-on. Specifically, desensitization, sensationalization, and dehumanization were the results of the media landscape permeating across the globe. There seemed to be an almost universal assertion: things are too big to tackle and we are never going to be able to step up. 

However, there was an exception that caught me off guard. One student whom I interviewed believed that it did not really matter if she or anyone else knew about complex issues. To her, everyone should just focus on their own thing and, if everyone tries to take a bite out of the apple, with nuclear people dealing with nuclear and climate people with climate, then most folks would be able to believe a little more strongly in the ability to address the overwhelming risks facing us today, risks that have become overwhelming through the myriad images we see online. I think this is a compelling line of thought and worth considering more. 

In addition, in the making of my film, the effects of disinformation became clearly apparent in front of my very eyes. Some students had wild conceptions about the risks of climate change, the timescale of the climate crisis, and even the degree to which foreign nations (like China) are carbon-neutral (it is not). People had their own wild takes on the crises before us. It was indicated that the media defined what risks are relevant. In one case, a student declared nuclear as unimportant because “it’s not being talked about.” People existed in the cells of misinformation that they knew existed: they just didn’t seem to think that it applied to them. 

And I thought this became relevant thinking about the responses they gave to the question of “Are we doomed?” No student, despite the universal pessimism, responded “yes.” This seemed to me like another case of information confusion, likely another effect of information siloes. This generation, which has grown up in a dark, media-heavy world, has, I think, a distorted view of society, humanity, and facts that confuse and muddle its ability to think clearly about the questions of doom that confront the world.

 

 

College students offer their own perspective on the issues of doomed-ness.

 

Citations:

Student interviewees remain name-anonymous.

News clips from ABC, FOX, NBC, and The Times Youtube Channels.