An interesting argument from The Atlantic, with some ideas about some of social media's toxic effects might be tamed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... cy/600763/
The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
Why it feels like everything is going haywire
Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true... Now imagine that one day, in the early 21st century, God became bored and, just for fun, doubled the gravitational constant. ...
Let’s rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. The U.S. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. ... For example, in “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison wrote about his fear of the power of “faction,” by which he meant strong partisanship or group interest that “inflamed [men] with mutual animosity” and made them forget about the common good. ... The Constitution included mechanisms to slow things down, let passions cool, and encourage reflection and deliberation.
...But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that—over the course of a decade—changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? ....
If you constantly express anger in your private conversations, your friends will likely find you tiresome, but when there’s an audience, the payoffs are different—outrage can boost your status. ....
The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. .... Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents—and sometimes even their friends—for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker’s intent is ignored....
Social media pushes people of all ages toward a focus on the scandal, joke, or conflict of the day, but the effect may be particularly profound for younger generations, who have had less opportunity to acquire older ideas and information before plugging themselves into the social-media stream.
Our cultural ancestors were probably no wiser than us, on average, but the ideas we inherit from them have undergone a filtration process. We mostly learn of ideas that a succession of generations thought were worth passing on. That doesn’t mean these ideas are always right, but it does mean that they are more likely to be valuable, in the long run, than most content generated within the past month. ...
Many Americans may think that the chaos of our time has been caused by the current occupant of the White House, and that things will return to normal whenever he leaves. But if our analysis is correct, this will not happen. Too many fundamental parameters of social life have changed....
On a somewhat related note, I'm seeing an increasing "outrage machine" in academia, driven by small groups of vocal student activists and enabled by administrators who want to avoid bringing down the wrath of social media on the school. One of the current trends is toward "forbidden" words, which are supposedly so painful that just hearing them is damaging - even in a neutral, academic, or supportive context . And these student groups demand - and often receive - consequences that range from expensive for the university (implementing cultural diversity and cultural humility training for all faculty and staff isn't free, and draws money from other needs) to life-changing (for the offender). One of the recent reports is below, followed by a couple of perspectives.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing ... ing-n-word
An attorney with the University of North Texas (UNT) resigned after using a racial slur during a presentation on hate speech titled “When Hate Comes to Campus.”
Caitlin Sewell, the assistant general counsel for the UNT system, was giving a presentation to about 250 audience members on Thursday about protected speech and the First Amendment, according to The Houston Chronicle.
Shortly after beginning, she warned onlookers that she would have to say something offensive in order to talk about offensive speech.
“It’s impossible to talk about the First Amendment without saying horrible things, like, you know, ‘You’re just a dumb n-----, and I hate you,’” Sewell said, according to audio recordings circulating on social media. “That’s protected speech. If you walk into the Dean of Students office and start screaming obscenities about, ‘F this place, F all of you, y’all are all f-ing stupid,’ they can escort you out and do that immediately.”...
Neal Smatresk, UNT’s president, released an apology after the event....Sewell resigned less than 24 hours later, and Smatresk wrote in a follow-up joint statement that UNT will reportedly be meeting with student leaders soon to “continue to foster a culture of diversity.”...
Sewell apologized to the students who questioned her, and tried to explain that she didn't mean to offend by using the offensive word in one case and a euphemism in another (I'd guess it was one of those automatic things - "the F-word" was a very common euphemism that most of us grew up with). But the intolerant students weren't buying it. And the university model these days is to favor the "paying customers," i.e., the students and their parents, in a controversy with a member of the faculty or staff.
btw, there have been several other incidents, including a black employee at a high school or junior high who ran afoul of a "zero tolerance" policy in Wisconsin and was fired for telling an out-of-control student not to call him that. This particular event revealed that this was not the first time this has happened but didn't get publicized. In one case, a teacher was apparently reading something to the students when he/she made the mistake of saying the word and not using a euphemism. I wouldn't be surprised if the book was Huckleberry Finn.
The editorials:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... rd/596872/
Laurie Sheck is a professor of creative writing at the New School in New York, a decades-long veteran of the classroom, a widely published novelist and essayist, and a Pulitzer nominee. She’s also spent the summer in trouble with her bosses for possibly being a racist.
Her offense? You may not have known that despite the resonance of the title of the renowned 2016 documentary on James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin’s actual statement, during a 1963 appearance on public television, was “I’m not a nigger.” Early last spring semester, Sheck, who is white, was teaching a graduate seminar on Baldwin, and one of the questions she posed for discussion was why the documentary title had substituted “Negro” for “nigger.”...
A white student in the class objected to Sheck’s having uttered the word. And administrators were apparently dissatisfied with Sheck’s attempt to defend herself, because the school put her under investigation, while directing her to reacquaint herself with the school’s rules about discrimination. ...
It isn’t rocket science to understand that words can have more than one meaning, and a sensible rule is that blacks can use the word but whites can’t.... However, since the 1990s this rule has undergone mission creep.... [and] respect... has morphed into a kind of genuflection that an outsider might find difficult to understand.
Some will object that we moderns are more advanced than those ‘80s troglodytes, or at least that the discussion has progressed, enrichened, that justice is being better served. And I am under no illusion that this is merely a matter of a certain kind of white performative wokeness. Quite a few black people, including authors of whole books on the word, would agree that Sheck should never utter that word at all for any reason.
We might ask, though, what the reason for a diktat like that is. ...
https://quillette.com/2019/11/07/racial ... escension/
Racial Slurs and Deferential Condescension
Over the last week, Western University (where I am currently enrolled) has been mired in scandal over an instructor’s decision to utter a racial slur during a discussion of popular culture in his English literature class. More specifically, the instructor (Andrew Wenaus) suggested that Will Smith’s use of the phrase “home butler,” in a 20-something year old episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, may have been a subtle reference (sanitized for consumption on syndicated television) to the phrase “house nigger,” which was, during the pre-emancipation period, used to refer to black slaves who worked in the household.
It is, I suppose, debatable whether Smith’s use of the phrase “home butler” was in fact intended by the show’s writers as a reference to the aforementioned slur. It is not, however, debatable whether or not this slur was used to refer to black slaves who worked in the household. That is a straightforward historical fact.
For daring to articulate this fact in his classroom, Wenaus has been dragged on social media (and by the local press) as racially insensitive at best, and a racist at worst. He has had to issue a public apology, along with promises to undergo additional sensitivity training, and Western’s president has established a specialized task-force aimed at combatting systemic racism on campus (of which Wenaus’ utterance apparently constitutes evidence). Meanwhile, Western’s Ethnocultural Support Service has issued a statement reminding the university community that it is always inappropriate for a white person to utter the offending term, “regardless of intent or how they said it.” ....
Such considerations are—or so we are now told—irrelevant to the question of whether Wenaus is guilty of a racist infraction. They are, in effect, trumped by the emotional reactions of the black students who were present, to which everyone else is being asked to defer. ...
The deferential standard is self-defeating in at least two ways. Firstly, it is unable to account for the fact that there will inevitably be differences of opinion among black people about whether a given incident or statement is racist....
The Quillette is a mixed bag but it sometimes has some interesting things. One of the things I like best about it is that the comments/discussion afterward are usually* fairly thoughtful and civil, unlike the comments section on the average news article. And people will politely call out inaccuracies in articles they think are nonsense.
*Though certain types of articles can attract a contingent of people just looking for confirmation of their biases about "lefties." (Whenever someone uses that particular term, I figure whatever else they have to say probably won't be worth my time. Most of the time, I'm right.)
Incidentally, I think the demand that students be "sheltered" from anything that might bother them has gone way too far lately:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4700 ... izing-jeff
Editors at the Northwestern University student paper "The Daily Northwestern" on Sunday issued an apology for what it called "mistakes" in its coverage of a campus event last week featuring former Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions.... He spoke at Northwestern on Nov. 5 amid heavy protests.
The editors at the paper from well-known journalism school specifically noted the photos taken at the event in their apology, noting that some students had found them to be “retraumatizing and invasive” and adding that those photos had been taken down.
"The Daily sent a reporter to cover that talk and another to cover the students protesting his invitation to campus, along with a photographer. We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night — along with how we plan to move forward," reads part of the apology.
This may be one of the more extreme examples but it's not alone. It's the way campus culture has been trending.