Is Twitter and Social Media + #MeToo a doomed cause?

[lmfao]

Social media doesn't seem to interface with the human brain well. We evolved for however many millions of years in nature, and we've been using our thumbs to type on phones for how long? 

In this digital age, men are even more poorly socialised. Interactions between humans rely on sending out the proper signals. Signals which have now been weakened, hijacked or completely removed now. 
---
What got me thinking about this #MeToo stuff recently was that in this gaming community I followed and was apart of for a while, Smash Bros, a bunch of stuff came out where respectable figureheads were found to have relations with minors or just sketchy things going on.

And it's good things like this come out. That people don't feel scared to come out and do share. A cleansing. But the environment of twitter is so toxic. Everyone is retarded, jumps the gun, neurotic, takes no action or takes extreme action, whines, trolls, and etc.

In an effort to weed out all the "problematic" (I use that word in the social justice sense) elements, innocent bystanders get lynched by the mob. You can't mention a single alternative perspective without being vilified or straw-manned. But I have a feeling this is just humans in general. You get misinterpreted by both sides regardless of what you say. 

Edited July 3, 2020 by lmfao

[Forestluv]

16 minutes ago, lmfao said:

In an effort to weed out all the "problematic" (I use that word in the social justice sense) elements, innocent bystanders get lynched by the mob. You can't mention a single alternative perspective without being vilified or straw-manned. 

It depends on what you consider an “alternative perspective”. Yes, there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions. However, there are also situations in which pushback can be helpful. For example, promoting Nazi ideology and formation of Nazi groups.

And to call someone getting criticized on social media a “lynching by a mob” seems like excessive victim mentality to me. Consider what an actual lynching by a mob is and put things in perspective.

[lmfao]

27 minutes ago, Serotoninluv said:

And to call someone getting criticized on social media a “lynching by a mob” seems like fragile victim mentality to me. 

It's not that there is criticism but just the way it happens. The knee-jerk reactions like you said. If someones feelings are hurt by having their reputation in their lifelong community destroyed in a split second, you can't invalidate that by calling it a "fragile victim mentality" no more than I can invalidate the victim of sexual harassment by calling them a fragile victim. I'm not equating the two, I'm just saying you can't invalidate it. You can't start a mature conversation otherwise. You'll probably think I'm being nitpicky or something, since you already agree with that but are just trying to point out the flaw in what I said and make me look inwards.

The general point I'm making is that virtual communication is terrible in many ways. 

I'm guessing you think this is overall positive though in the bigger picture, and that this is the messy process of ego backlash and change and etc? 

In which case, I'm lacking perspective and am caught up in the trivial

Edited July 3, 2020 by lmfao

[Opo]

Im not buying it that we have worse communication now. 

Most of the old people i meet are half autistic. They just talk without thinking if anyone is paying attention, when you ask them a question they cant process it, they are unable to express emotions.... 

Edit: maybe people when they become old they just start loosing their minds. 

Edited July 3, 2020 by Opo

[Apparition of Jack]

I see social media and the internet at large as kind of like being cars.

When cars were first invented, people driving them was a pretty chaotic affair. Things like speed limits, traffic lights, seat belts, etc., as well as just the general attitude of "good behaviour" one has when driving a car, all hadn't been invented, and as a result there was an absurdly high number of crashes and fatalities associated with them. It was only after time, through a process of trial and error, did humanity start to regulate the use of cars (both collectibely and individually) so that they could be both safe and effective.

The same thing is happening with the internet. The internet is at most only about 30 years old, and as far as mass adoption of it you're looking at 15 to 20 years maximum. That's still really early days for a technology that has had such a massive impact on our ways of life. Of course mistakes were going to be made. People have gotten addicted to it, used it for all sorts of nefarious purposes, made terrible decisions on it, been taught the wrong things about it, weaponised it, etc. Major companies have even exploited evolutionary psychology to make more profits from it, if that doesn't tell you how immature we've been with it I don't know what does.

What I think we're starting to see the beginning of though is a major effort to try and regulate it (both through laws and our own personal behaviour) so that the worst effects of this new access to communication are mitigated. I think the idea the internet being a place where it's acceptable to just be a random online troll is slowly fading away, and people are realising that the internet more or less forms a core part of our social identities now. When I log on to twitter these days what I think I am witnessing is a creeping recognition that what you say has real-world consequences, even if it's online, and that when you have too many people being assholes to each other constantly everyone suffers as a result. Of course, since this is still a new process these efforts are going to be rather crude and blunt at first and it'll come across as needlessly puritanical and hair-triggered, but over time people will just begin to accept that internet interaction has to be polite and respectful as the rule.

Edited July 3, 2020 by Apparition of Jack

[Forestluv]

54 minutes ago, lmfao said:

It's not that there is criticism but just the way it happens. The knee-jerk reactions like you said. If someones feelings are hurt by having their reputation in their lifelong community destroyed in a split second, you can't invalidate that by calling it a "fragile victim mentality" no more than I can invalidate the victim of sexual harassment by calling them a fragile victim.

I don’t mean to invalidate it. I’m saying context matters. It depends on the situation. A Nazi organizer that has his feelings hurt because he is marginalized from mainstream social media is different than someone supporting Thomas Jefferson statues on social media.

And in cases in which someone is marginalized for their views, is that really akin to someone getting lynched by an angry mob? People have a tendency to equalize their self hurts to much greater hurts.This elevates the significance of their self hurt. 

54 minutes ago, lmfao said:

The general point I'm making is that virtual communication is terrible in many ways. 

I agree

54 minutes ago, lmfao said:

I'm guessing you think this is overall positive though in the bigger picture, and that this is the messy process of ego backlash and change and etc? 

In which case, I'm lacking perspective and am caught up in the trivial

I think it depends on the situation. There are cases of excess. If I stated support for a Thomas Jefferson statue and people started threatening me - that is excessive. Yet there are situations I think pushback is appropriate. For example, Germany took a hard stance prohibiting pro-Nazi speech and expression. Look how far they have come relative to the “anything goes“ pro-Confederate free expression in the U.S. Germany has made more progress in a few decades a few decades than the U.S. has made in over 140 years! The U.S. is still struggling with white supremacy expressed through pro-confederate symbolism. Germany is not debating wether to take down statues honoring Hitler, yet the U.S. is debating wether to take down studs honoring those who fought for slavery. . . .In this situation, I think it’s for the better to marginalize and stigmatize this type of toxicity. It’s not simple an “alternative perspective”. Yet I also think things can be taken to far in which non-toxic alternative perspectives get caught up in the purge. I think Green should be mindful of over-reaching.

[Forestluv]

@Apparition of Jack I like your car analogy. To add into it. . . A few decades ago, driving drunk in the U.S. was not a big deal. If a drunk driver got pulled over by police, they cop often gave the person a ride home. There were no legal or social consequences. In the 1980s, a group of mothers created the group Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and they completely changed the social consciousness of drunk driving. They exposed all the harm caused. At first there was pushback and a lot of people thought MADD was over-reacting. Yet overtime their was a consciousness shift. Drunk driving became a bad thing. There was a new social stigma with drunk driving. People no longer could say to their co-workers “What a great party! I drove home so wasted that I actually parked my car on my front lawn” and everyone laughs. Those days were over. And new legal consequences arose. People lost their “freedom” to drink at parties and drive home drunk, yet this benefited society.

[lmfao]

@Serotoninluv amen

@Opo I mean depends on education levels and etc. I think there's just been a little more of a disconnect with nature. And yeah. Old people are just old. 

@Apparition of Jack Yeah, the car analogy is good. 

Edited July 3, 2020 by lmfao

[Boethius]

6 hours ago, lmfao said:

In an effort to weed out all the "problematic" (I use that word in the social justice sense) elements, innocent bystanders get lynched by the mob. You can't mention a single alternative perspective without being vilified or straw-manned. But I have a feeling this is just humans in general.

What are the mechanisms in place offline that keep people in-check & prevent accusations of wrongdoing from spiralling out of control? Some that come to mind for me are

(1) enforceable community rules & norms
(2) commonly understood social contexts
(3) the presence of authority figures
(4) personal relationships that develop between individuals
(5) the power of social ostracism

Even in some offline spaces (like academia & activist spaces) things can become heated and spiral out of control, but I think this generally does not happen offline so much because of how profoundly context-rich most of our social situations are. Online spaces/communities are generally context-poor by comparison and are much more prone to actions/reactions that are lacking in balance, perspective, proportion, etc. This is exceptionally true once we start to introduce issues of violation and trauma (like sexual harassment) into online spaces. My guess is that over time our online spaces have and will conitnue to become more context-rich so that these responses become more controlled and measured.