Efftup
Senior Member.
This article: is a very interesting article about how we like to try and always paint the "Other Side" of our views as idiotic and daft, when they may just have a different view on something and for their own perfectly good reasons.
But also how we like to create an echo chamber where laughing at people with opposing views tries to reinforce our own, and how so many people like to share things on social media without even caring if they are true or not.
It also suggests we should always go into something with the POSSIBILITY at least, that we MIGHT be wrong on this one.
But also how we like to create an echo chamber where laughing at people with opposing views tries to reinforce our own, and how so many people like to share things on social media without even caring if they are true or not.
It also suggests we should always go into something with the POSSIBILITY at least, that we MIGHT be wrong on this one.
Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America. Over time, this morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy "Other Side" that must be laughed at — an Other Side that just doesn’t "get it," and is clearly not as intelligent as "us." But this holier-than-thou social media behavior is counterproductive, it’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse and if we want to consider online discourse productive, we need to move past this.
What is emerging is the worst kind of echo chamber, one where those inside are increasingly convinced that everyone shares their world view, that their ranks are growing when they aren’t. It’s like clockwork: an event happens and then your social media circle is shocked when a non-social media peer group public reacts to news in an unexpected way. They then mock the Other Side for being "out of touch" or "dumb."
Fredrik deBoer, one of my favorite writers around, touched on this in his Essay "Getting Past the Coalition of the Cool."