Comment on My go-to formula
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 5 months agoYou’re right, but I’m confident enough in saying that most people don’t film videos or record themselves saying what they want to in order to engage online most of the time. I mean to say that dropping a written comment on a Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy, Xitter, etc. post makes it far more easy for people to try to infer meaning where there is none. I’m convinced that sort of indirection that the internet has made a much more common element in human discourse has greatly influenced the increase in political polarization.
For example, if someone posts “#ACAB,”someone who was shot by a cop for stealing a loaf of bread is likely to relate to it and assume that OP completely understands their plight, but someone whose parent or sibling is a cop will likely assume that OP is prejudiced and presumptive when in actuality OP was just posting their gut reaction to the movie 21 Bridges.
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Erm have you heard of TikTok or seen what goes on there? Loads of people posting about radical politics. It’s not just text mediums. Radical opinions aren’t new, terrorism and Nazis didn’t start with the internet.
Also a strange example to choose. Cops in America are pretty bad. Police in general support the interests of capital just as much as they help ordinary people. I don’t know if it’s possible to build a society without some form of policing, but the system we have now isn’t great.
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 5 months ago
And yes, of course there are people posting videos, but the vast majority of communication on the internet is via text by a long shot. My point isn’t that someone is right or wrong in what they infer from or relate to in the writing, but my point is that the prevalence of unreviewed and unedited text in everyday life nowadays thanks to the internet has further increased the average size of the gap between an author’s intent and the meaning that a reader infers from it. What I’m trying to say is that the wider the gap between intended meaning and inferred meaning gets, the more toxic the relationship between any given person and the public at large gets in general. Text-based communication makes it easy for that gap to be wide. Unreviewed text-based communication just widens that gap. Reading a lot of un-reviewed text based communication from other people makes that gap even wider. That’s what I mean by corrosive.
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Not really as you can actually post follow up questions on the internet.