Most of us probably believe we at least know what our opinions are about most things in life and also feel pretty confident about how we see things.  Yet, if you’re like me, given the right circumstances you might find out that you don’t know more than you realized you didn’t know.  How does that saying go from college philosophy classes,  something along the lines of “we know what we know” and maybe “we know what we don’t know” but only if we’re really paying attention will “we not know what we don’t know.”

You can imagine my amazement while working on a social media evaluation project to discover that I have many more definite opinions than I realized.  Perhaps this opportunity revealed itself because in this project instead of weaving through various social media only to land upon that which really sparks my interest I am required to spend time on each post and to evaluate them.  For example, because I am such a huge animal lover and nature lover you would think (I certainly did!) that I would want to watch or read every video or post that had animals involved wouldn’t you?  As it turns out, that part of me that is all about justice really has some definite opinions about what type of animal videos, memes, jpgs are out there and specifically what is okay and what is not. Like a video going around that shows a mama giraffe giving birth in the zoo with all the people on the other side of her cage watching her walk around with her baby’s hooves sticking out and even a zookeeper following her with a video camera as she goes through the birthing process.  It is true that if I happened upon the same situation whilst on an African Safari (photography of course) and I could observe a giraffe giving birth like this without being obvious (think Jane Goodall) I would watch and be fascinated but this incident struck me as being particularly garish since this normally wild beast was imprisoned and because it was surrounded by predators (yes dear people, in the wild, certainly around such a vulnerable time we would be considered predators I’m almost certain) the video was painful to even just see the still of what it was without even viewing the content.

Thought for the Day: Wonder if something like social media, which many of us may judge to be just hitting the surface of life, when looked upon more deeply can help us to learn unexpected things about ourselves and others?

Helpful Hints for Being Human: It’s a good thing for us to open up our minds and hearts for new information about ourselves and others because it’s possible that there may be a whole lot out there that we don’t know that we don’t know!