Comment by bork1
5 years ago
I think this framing of the issue is pretty interesting. There are a decent number of articles that talk about how cancel culture affects celebrities, but I do think it would be pretty hard to quantify the effects of cancel culture. It seems hard to define.
Personally, I'm not totally sold by the letter from Harper's. But I don't have data one way or another to support my bias. I don't believe at face value that cancel culture is the root cause (or even a root cause) of the problems folks see with American public discourse. I wonder how to quantify something like this.
Why do you need data when you can experience the chilling effect cancel culture has on open discussion for yourself?
Well, when people argue against BLM/M4BL I often hear calls to statistics. That's a potential bias of my own, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think about what metrics we might be able to use as indicators of whether cancel culture is created by an unsubstantiated bias that some folks have or if it might actually be a phenomenon that has a real impact on the way that the average person communicates.
Basically what I'm saying is that I personally don't feel or notice a lot of "cancel culture" within my own life, and I'm trying to better understand where people feel like it comes from. Data might not be necessary, but it might also make the impacts more clear. I'm just wondering about how to frame the issue in a way that makes sense to me.