Comment by lostlogin
5 years ago
Please could you explain this bit a little further?
> The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all
Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
Or are you saying that social media took off because those in the US already felt free to speak and then a platform appeared?
>Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
because US public discourse has been, in the past, dominated by elites. Politics was largely the domain of the upper middle-class, politicians were largely homogenous demographically drawn from top-tier universities, the media recruited from similar institutions, and so on. So you have a significantly narrower spectrum in what is considered 'political debate' than what is actually present in the population, and the people who are doing the debating are largely shielded in their personal life from consequences because it's a sort of intellectual exercise and filling op-ed pages, not a matter of life and safety. That's what created the idea of 'free' debate, but rather it's insular debate. Culture in the US was predominantly created top-down.
Social media kind of blew this wide open in all directions. You see this take alot these days that Americans 'used to live in the same reality' and now don't, and it's the fault of liberals, conservatives, the media, postmodernism or whatever else. But really what's happening is that Americans never lived in the same reality, but finally middle America, and black lives matter, and metoo get to actually speak up. And that's going to cause much more heat than a bunch of harvard grads in a debate club, because now the people who actually have skin in the game are part of the discussion rather than just the subject of it.
People who spend their time commenting on social networks are not necessarily people who actually have skin in the game.
From my relatively small sample of the Czech Twitter, the discourse there is dominated by about thirty journalists and white collar workers. No ghetto voices to be heard; people in ghettos have more urgent problems than to sit on the phone and crank out 60 status updates a day.
People in American ghettos do express their opinions online, but the upper classes and special interest groups have much more ability to construct and influence the dominant narratives. So one should always question whatever is the prevailing wisdom surrounding lower class Americans. For example, in the 80s and 90s it was thought that a punitive criminal justice system and a draconian war on drugs was what they needed. Turns out, retrospectively, that was probably not an optimal approach and most people nowadays want to ratchet down the war on drugs.
That's a very good point about Twitter, but the Internet is way bigger than that...
This right here. This has been my position since the beginnings of the stirrings of the discontent that social media was powering years ago.
I think that this is why there has been such a push back by each of the demographics and movements that you listed. They each have a voice and can be more powerfully organized than ever before albeit in some cases a more superficial basis hence the rise of cancel culture.
Traditionally if you wanted to get a way from push back in your locale you moved. Now that is not an option since so much of your speech is tied to a identifiable account that follows you hence the social cooling.
I think this time of change is a phase of growing pains that might last generations that will see us wrestle with these issues for a long time.