god i hate the woke island. and the feminist island. and the patriarchy island. all of them. really hate them. if your identifying as something other than CIS suddenly everyone has an opinion. on everything. all the time. it's like everyone has a manifest that they throw into your face. god i hate them
3 years ago
when you're in the US there social media influencer and importance is a lot bigger, the media itself works different from Europe, too, not only in the way they publish but also how they write and communicate and research. other parts of the world are a lot slower sometimes. at the same time the social bubble tries to catch up to the fastest social movements out there. guess what I am going at is the fact that traditional behavior is in itself mostly offline, yet it's just as toxic and unwieldy as the social islands. and it does affect everyone else (those not online) · 3 years ago
@calgacus I think social media is very good at convincing you that is the case, but considering the stark difference between online reality where the sky is always falling and you'd think we were in the midst of the horrors of the french revolution, and offline reality which for the most part chugs along like none of this is happening; I can't see how that is the case. Or rather, it is only the case in the sense that there are a lot of people who believe this is true because they only read the news and look at social media, but never look out the window for themselves and rarely ever talk to real people anymore. · 3 years ago
I think social media _is_ discourse these days. What happens on the internet is real life, and an increasingly large amount of life is online-exclusive. The flattening on the human experience, unfortunately. · 3 years ago
@defunct Yeah, what I'm saying is that social media is a major driver of this dynamic. It's definitely begining to leak into the wider discourse as well. · 3 years ago
just to clarify, I don't have a social media presence on InstaFaceLinkedTwitter. also I don't follow anyone there. my experiences are mostly outside the internet, where like-minded people wage an ideology war against the conservatives at work, where families stick to the norm because they are afraid their kids take the fall for their decisions, where company management all look like black penguins and unless you dress like one yourself you're never going to get that promotion · 3 years ago
I honestly don't even think this fundamentally is about politics, or left or right. It's a result of meaning-starved people finding social media such as twitter, which rewards extreme opinions with a precious sense of belonging to a group and having a purpose (that is only held together by the fact that they can't stand people who aren't in the same group). This is exacerbated by the fact that you can shut those other people out of your life, a real problem, since having to meet and deal with those who do not all share your own views is the best remedy for this type of smallmindedness · 3 years ago
@degrowther taxonomies aren't the cause of it, but they are a transport medium to bring opinions to the target group. opinions that are founded on mostly lies and bad reflection. when people are afraid of change they'll never tell you that they are scared, they make up reasons for why that thing that scares them needs to go away and can't be. same applies to most things, and taxonomy is a good reason to use · 3 years ago
Jules Gill-Peterson said something smart on Twitter recently: “It’s strange to live in a moment when queer and trans people are largely devoted to taxonomy, as if it were emancipatory. It’s...famously a moralizing and pathologizing mode of scientific knowledge!”
Maybe I misunderstand you but it sounds like you're tired of taxonomies, OP. · 3 years ago
Good people are those that realize every human has value, every human has inner thoughts and that every human is in the same boat as themselves: trying to figure out what it means to live life well.
It doesn't matter if they are different ideologically, a truly good person will care about others whom they disagree with.
Finding a group of good people is hard. The internet (and smolnet) is not the place to find those people,but they are hard to find IRL too.
To find a person to do work for you, look for a person who is working. To find a good dancer, look who is on the dance floor. To find a good person, look for a person doing good. · 3 years ago
Social media 'communities' are an illusion. There's no meaningful discourse, because the software is designed to expire conversations quickly. All nuance of personal relationships is snuffed out, so drive-by yelling of opinions is all that's left. Yet you hate it as if it was real. You're wasting your time hating on an illusion. · 3 years ago