Comment by bumby
5 years ago
I don't know if you realize it but you seem to give yourself a more nuanced existence while denying that same understanding in others' parent comments.
You (rightly) acknowledged that you can be privileged in some areas but disadvantaged in others, but seem to take the stance in a previous statement that there is no progress, just "gilded age nonsense" because there are still marginalized groups.
We can acknowledge progress while still admitting there is a lot of work to be done. There's no reason to treat them as mutually exclusive. My worry is that those who take the alternate stance ironically end up alienating potential allies. Or, to butcher the old idiom, they fail to realize that expecting perfection can get in the way of progress.
Sorry, how have I argued there has been no progress?
I would certainly say that on social issues I do not believe there has been enough progress, but there absolutely has been a lot of progress.
On the specific issue of bubbles, I have argued for a complex view that the nature of the boundaries of people's social bubbles have changed. As I don't think there's a good way to measure this I take as a baseline that it may have largely stayed the same but the way we experience conflict over it has changed.
Your previous dismissal of in-person social interaction as evidence comes across as stating there was no progress on this front until the internet "finally" forced people to interact across cultural lines. My apologies if I misinterpreted your point.
Oh, I mean, I think the bubbles have shifted to some degree historically depending on culture and conflict but did largely remain within the scope possible with in person interaction. Exposure to groups outside an individual's own has grown with every communication invention as well, from books to newspapers to radio to phones to the internet.
Social media I think does, however, represent an exponential growth in how much "outside perspective" people are exposed to, as well as the intrusiveness of those perspectives. All those other communication inventions required filtering perspectives through layers of privilege (media, basically).
On social media though I can post a tweet about my lunch and have someone from across the ocean tell me I deserve to die for who I am in the replies to it. No one in history has ever had to face that level of forced interaction on so mundane a social act until now.
And that's why we put up walls. To get back to where we were 20 years ago. Not because we can't handle "disagreement", but because when I'm eating lunch I don't want to be told I don't deserve to live.
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