Comment by tolerance
1 day ago
This article is rife with wishful thinking and honestly I don't know if society has ever been as harmonious as I feel like it alleges. As if there was a time where everyone just got along and things were great and you could get an egg cream for a quarter after the sock hop.
I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.
The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of truth when the direction of humanity is involved.
So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return to that is free from the influential few.
The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous ones.
People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.
That's just the way it is.
The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
So I think that suggesting that society isn't toxic in it's current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the internet is its pavilion, not its public square.
And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true direction for people to choose demands contending against all the goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with to assume the good faith of the common man.
The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations to fund this effort.
I can only say that it is worse now than at any other time I have lived (I say this at 61 years old, white guy, FWIW).
There's a complete lack of ... unity? Everything including the weather is now pigeon-holed into something political (and therefore "tribal"). Sock hops and the soda fountain were before my time, but I can speak for the 70's and say it was not this crazy.
Nut jobs like The John Birch Society (just to pick on one group of the era) were not given a global megaphone. Say what you want about newspapers, etc. but the "Fourth Estate" had to earn reader's trust, could not expect to just act to inflame the fringe elements of society.
I think what makes this time worse than the past (with respect to the idea that the past was bad too; see the sibling Jim Crow comment) is that in the present everyone is a target.
Was it Marshall McLuhan say something about man devolving into tribalism with the expansion of digital media? The individuation of the literate mind as opposed to the shared vision of the tribal, oral mind; new technology replacing one thing and simultaneously bringing back another from the past.
I want to say that the notion of unity was subsidized by a faith in liberal democracy. Even during the 60s and the 70s, my impression as that the language of activists back then, and consequently the conceptualization of their ideals, didn't stray far from a common dialect of the establishment, rooted in some kind of shared interpretation of democracy during that time. At least in a shared interpretation fundamentally, with conflict stemming from subsidiary ends.
Maybe what we're faced with now is the natural progression of the dissolution of a shared interpretation for social cohesion and whatever's meaningful behind why we want to bond with each other. So we tear away from each other in order to come back together. And it will never be exactly how it was before and maybe that's for the better in the end. Because what it took to get here wasn't great to begin with.
Yes because there was complete unity during Jim Crow, when there were laws against miscegenation, gay people weren’t allowed in the military, etc.
To be sure, there were times that were much worse. (I was a homophobe myself growing up ... until my best friend came out as gay after high school — then I had some actual growing up to do.)
But we're free to say this thing was better in the 70's without implying all things were. The internet has created a lot of problems that we did not have before is all I am really saying.
> The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
This is how I feel for the past 8 years or so; like I've been forced to become more and more deranged, because it seems like everyone either fully supports or tacitly agrees with an insane narrative that one way or another paints me or people like me as an enemy.
I can't just take what anyone says at face value anymore, or give the benefit of the doubt. I know that as soon as they say a key word, or behave in a specific way, or even just dress in a specific way that I'm dealing with some kind of narrative that is openly hostile. It may not even be that I disagree, just that I don't want to signal myself that way. I just want to form my own opinions, but that's usually difficult and often insulting to other people. People flip like a switch as soon as they sense you're not going to fully agree with them.
The postmodern bent of our discourse is really hard to deal with because you get immediately deconstructed into one of maybe a dozen categories when you say/do anything: lib, grifter, shill, racist, snowflake, bootlicker, chud, commie, fascist, creep, etc.
I can't even cut my hair without someone categorizing me based off of it.
I mostly consume media through an RSS feed nowadays, and it hasn't helped at all, although I now don't have as much "content" to deal with emotionally.
With RSS I don't have to relitigate arguments and ideas in my own head in order to feel secure as much as before, but the way I interact with people is still deeply warped by the entire discourse.