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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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The Lost Cause prologue, Part V

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

In my upcoming solarpunk novel The Lost Cause (Nov 14), we get an epic struggle between the people doing the repair and care work needed to save our planet and species, and the reactionary wreckers who want to kill the Green New Deal and watch the world burn:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks, which means that I make my own indie editions and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, along with ebooks and hardcovers. I narrated this one! It came out great! You can back it here:

http://lost-cause.org

This week, I've been serializing the prologue to give you a taste of what you can expect from the book, which Bill McKibben calls "politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

And part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

And part four:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#super-soaker-full-of-hydrochloric-acid

And now, part five:

Look, I had weeks to go until graduation. I had a life to live. I had stuff to do.

Gramps and his friends would stew and shout. Idiots on the internet would make dank memes out of Mike Kennedy and deepfake him into a million videos, turn him into a main character whose image would be around long after he left the world.

I just had to keep my head down, collect my diploma, and get the hell out of Burbank. I’d already been provisionally accepted for a Blue Helmets AmeriCorps spot down in San Juan Capistrano, helping to rebuild the city’s lower half a mile inland, up in the hills. I was going to do a year of that and then go to college: I had applications in to UCLA, Portland State (they had a really good refugee tech undergrad program), and the University of Waterloo, where my mom did her undergrad in environmental science. They’d let me declare my major in my second year, so I could take a wide variety of courses before settling on something, and if anything, Canada’s free college was even more generous than the UC system or Portland’s, with a subsidy for dorms and meals.

To tell the truth, I’d be glad to go. My senior year hadn’t been anything like I’d anticipated. Gramps’s health had gotten a lot worse the previous summer and his shitty sexist and racist remarks chased away any home help worker Burbank sent over within a week or two, so I’d been trying to keep my grades up while picking up after Gramps, getting him to take his meds, washing his sheets and cleaning his toilet—not to mention making sure he made his doctor’s appointments and even bringing him into the office a couple of times a month for the kind of exams you couldn’t do by telemedicine.

I wasn’t sure what Gramps would do without me to take care of him, but at that point, I was running out of fucks to give. Let his asshole Maga Club buddies look after him, or maybe Gramps could figure out how not to offend everyone that came over to wipe his ass and do his laundry. He was—as he was fond of pointing out to me—a grown-ass adult, and this was his house, and he was in charge. So let him be in charge.

I put myself to bed stewing about all of this, thinking of San Juan Capistrano. Some of my older friends had graduated the previous years and had gone down there and I’d followed their relocation of the old mission on their feeds. It looked like hot, sweaty, rewarding work, the kind of thing where you could really measure your progress.

For the second night in a row, I was woken up at 2 a.m. This time, it wasn’t my screen, it was Gramps, who’d stumped into my room with his cane, flipped my lights to full on, and started shaking me and calling out, “Get up, kid, get up!”

“I’m up,” I said, getting up on my elbows and squinting at him.

He was shaking, and he reeked—of both booze and BO, and I felt a flash of guilt for not getting him in the bath that day.

“God dammit,” he said, and staggered a bit. I leapt out of bed, pulling the sheets off with me, and steadied him at the elbow.

“Calm down, okay? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. No one is all right. Fuck all right and fuck you.” I’d had Gramps tested for early dementia the previous year, by showing his doctor videos of moments like these. The doc had run a battery of tests before pronouncing, “Your grandfather isn’t senile, he’s just ornery.” Which was undeniable, and also pissed me the hell off. “Ornery” was a polite word for “asshole.” What the doc was telling me was that Gramps didn’t have to be cruel. He was cruel by choice.

I untangled myself from the sheets and piled them on the bed.

“What is it?”

“It’s Mike Kennedy, that asshole. Someone shot him.”

“What?”

He shoved his giant screen into my hands. I tapped the video window. It was from the POV of a car cam, that weird fish-eye view of a self-driving car, split-screen with the passenger in the front seat, and it was Mike Kennedy, looking even worse than Gramps, bloodshot and trembling, with that under-chin camera angle that makes everyone look like they’re half dead.

I tried to watch both halves. There was Kennedy, whispering something to him. There was the cul-de-sac he was parked in, false-lit with IR from the cameras. The timestamp was 1:17. Less than an hour before.

Then the external image flickered for a second and resolved itself into a man, who phased in and out. He was wearing a ghillie suit like the one Kennedy had worn on the roof, covered in telltale CV dazzle stripes, designed to exploit defects in the computer vision system. You had to wear a different specific pattern for every algorithm, but if you got the right matchup, the computer would simply not see you. The man was flickering into existence when his posture crumpled up the ghillie suit and made the pattern stop working, then out again when he straightened up.

He straightened and disappeared and Mike Kennedy’s eyes widened as he noticed the man for the first time—computer dazzle worked on computers, not humans—and he started to say something and then a round hole appeared in his forehead, his head snapping back against the headrest, then careening forward. The flickering phantom appeared again as the man in the ghillie suit turned and disappeared.

I dropped the tablet to my bed.

“Jesus Christ, Gramps, I didn’t need to see that snuff movie—”

He tried to smack me then. I was ready for it. I was faster. I stepped out of his reach. I was shaking too.

“You don’t get to hit me anymore old man. Never again, you hear me?”

He was purpling now, and a decade’s worth of fleeing and defusing his rages rose in me, made me want to apologize. After all, I rationalized, he’d just seen a friend murdered.

But I’d seen that friend murdered too, videobombed with a snuff flick at 2 a.m. without warning or consent. It was a traumatizing, selfish, asshole move. I’d be watching that movie on the backs of my eyelids for years to come. And the friend who’d died? He’d been ready to kill me. Gramps had no right. He was a grown-ass adult. He had no right.

“Listen to me, you little shit, you think you can live under my roof, take my charity, and talk to me like that? Now? With all the shit that I’m going through? No sir. No. Get out, you little bastard, get out now. Get out before I kick your goddamned teeth in.” He was vibrating with rage now, literally, actually shaking so hard his wispy hair swished back and forth across his forehead.

I didn’t say another word. I picked up some jeans and a jacket, put a pair of socks in a jacket pocket, and jammed my feet into a pair of sneakers without bothering to unlace them. I shouldered past him—still vibrating, stinking even worse—and banged out the back door and stomped through the nighttime streets.

My feet automatically took me up to Verdugo, and then across the empty road. I turned toward school—as I did every morning—and autopiloted in that direction. By the time I reached the Verdugo Aquatic Facility I had calmed down enough to realize that there was no reason to go to school at two thirty in the morning, so I stopped and headed for the playground in the park behind the pool. I sat down on a bench and kicked my shoes off and shook out the playground sand, pulled out my socks and put them on, then put my shoes back on properly. I was still furious, but now I could think straight and my hands weren’t shaking. Gramps and I hadn’t had a blowup like that in years, mostly— okay, entirely—because I’d backed down every time we’d been headed in that direction. I wasn’t in any mood to back down. Not ever, to be fully honest.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#part-v

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #books #science fiction #clifi #solarpunk #crowdfunding #audiobooks #the lost cause #fiction

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joemuggs · 1 year

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ESCAPE THE CRINGE

I first wrote this piece for an art mag at the start of the year but they dicked me about over rewrites so much - and I mean really dicking about, like radio silence for three weeks then suddenly demanding changes for the next day - that for the first time in my life I actually pulled a piece. A couple of other outlets were up for it, but needed further alteration to fit house style... With so much going on I let it slide and let it slide, and now it's been so long I just feel like shoving it out there. It still feels relevant (maybe more so now that we're seeing an increasing public collapse of some of the most high profile demagogue scammers, albeit with new hydra heads quickly replacing them), and I'd rather have people see it and maybe feed back, rather than wrangle over it any further. So without further preamble, here's some thoughts about one of the defining reactions of our time and how to get away from it.

👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

We live in a time when groupthink and echo chambers are everywhere, where ingroup radicalisation, cult-like behaviours and submission to scammers and demagogues seem to be defining patterns of the era. Blame for these things is often laid at the feet of algorithms, of politicians, of capital - in many cases rightly so - but we all individually play the game too. We build the walls of our own cultural gated communities, with tweets and artworks and individual choices about where to go and what to say, and the more we do so the more those spaces that we force ourselves – and others – into become more or less gilded prisons. We all think we’re hip to something, and end up orbiting that something endlessly.

The first rule of hip club is you don’t talk about hip club. That is: if you’re serious about your aesthetic nowadays, you do your very best to not acknowledge that it even is an aesthetic – let alone identify its rules and delineations. Now, of course this doesn’t go for everyone: there are still anime cosplayers, emo kids and others who still gauchely adhere to the overt “style tribe” late 20th century ways of belonging. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Far more often the things that make us “us”, that hold us together, are still based on taste - but these tastes that provide us with a sense of belonging are signalled covertly. They’re signalled not by discussing, or even necessarily knowing, what preferences make you belong among Your People, but rigidly enforcing the ingroup-outgroup divide with reactions against The Others’ tastes: through a set of real or figurative winces, grimaces and cringes.

Oh yes, the cringe. That most visceral response, often deployed simply as a single word sentence by the Terminally Online, the argument ender to end all argument enders: just “cringe”. It’s noun, verb and adjective all rolled together into a gut level rejection, and it’s a dead giveaway that so, so many parts of The Discourse - as people solipsistically have it - is based way more on aesthetics than it is on any kind of coherent set of positions. That is, it’s less about showing revulsion at ideas, than about the fact that they’re expressed gauchely or clumsily or simply with the wrong slang. It’s a social cue, a nod to one’s fellows, to acknowledge shared good taste in memes, phrases and cadences, which one’s interlocutor has unforgivably failed to engage properly with.

This kind of of us-and-them cringe-signalling operates in various ways across society, but perhaps the most fundamental dichotomy is basic vs hip, or normie vs hip. This in itself is framed in a variety of ways, but a super simplified version might run like this: influencer culture, sincere slogans, Will Ferrell and The Office memes, Goop wellness, "Fiat 500 Twitter" on one side - and shitposting, pursuit of the latest zero-caps punctuational microvariant, everything intellectualised but ironised, the moods formerly known as “based” and "dank" on the other. The former sees the latter as smug, pretentious, nonsensical, messy while in the other direction the hip cast the basics as conservative, simplistic, unimaginative, conformist. Each cringes at the other, each considers the other fundamentally in bad taste.

And these dichotomies are held in place firmly by the material interests of vested powers. So to keep with our sample duality, on the basic side, there are the affirmatory or aspirational solution-havers, the Matt Haigs and Johann Haris, Rupi Kaurs and Molly Maes, while on the hip side there’s the Somethingawful-to-Vice-to-Broadsheet ironymonger pipeline and the Politics Podcast Industrial Complex embodied in people called things like “PissPigGrandad”. Each relies on hate and fear of the other to provide a steady stream of attention and income to those who shore up their own self-image, who normalise an way of being, who provide just enough answers to make people feel like they’re on the right track, but not so many that they won’t keep coming back for more. Yet each is, of course, built on a lie.

The basic think they are commonsensical and unpretentious, but actually adhere to byzantine aesthetic and political codes of belonging. The hip think they are switched on, fast moving and progressive but in fact their gatekeeping is deeply conservative: the solipsism of believing an echo chamber is “The Discourse”, no matter how ironically you try to couch that, is all about normalising enormously limited race, age, nationality and class boundaries around what is acceptable. Both are co-dependent false divisions of ideas and people made to shore up power structures and the interests of the privileged, and both are built on aesthetics above all else. Each is, in its own way, an insistence of good taste.

Once you see this, you see it everywhere. There are so many versions of this mutually exclusionary duality. Sometimes they’ll manifest as ostensible generational, regional or professional divides, sometimes as scene or faction schisms (and note well, political factions have more in common with musical, fashion or social scenes than anyone within them would ever care to admit). Each time, if you look, you’ll find that they are defined more by aesthetics than ethics: by those assemblages of catchphrases, by certain quirks of timing and emphasis. Whether it’s Dawkins and Harris quoting facts-and-reason guys defining themselves against what they think of as a feminised, emotion-driven mushiness in the barbaric masses, or underground music fans against the flash and spectacle of EDM, or vintage specs wearing postgrad ketamine-leftist cliques against “shitlib centrists”, or crypto-bros against anyone who doesn’t have a wallet, all too often the sense of self is generated by what one is NOT.

And each time if you dig into what is happening in these oppositions, you’ll find someone benefitting in real, material terms: spokespeople, figureheads, demagogues, people whose theories or slogans are rallying points for believers and who rely on those believers for speaking engagements, podcast and newsletter subscriptions, NFT sales, academic tenure, political appointments, newspaper columns. There is a whole egosystem of commentariat and metacommentariat whose job appears to make bogeymen of one another, yet who one all too often finds in the upper echelons are on perfectly friendly terms when they run into one another in green rooms of media recordings, backstage at literary festivals or in the offices of the agents that they share. This last location not picked idly, n.b.: one of the UK’s loudest hip-left commentators of the past decade shares a literary agent with a leading hip-right provocateur and an old-school hard-right rabble rouser: they are very literally all in it together.

All of this, it really bears repeating, is built on lies, and further, is built on consciously or unconsciously deliberate obscuring of the truth, in order to support these power structures. If ever you see an argument that’s built around one of these abstracted dualities - pop vs underground, modernist vs traditional, respectable vs transgressive, health vs pleasure, decadence vs morality, rationalism vs “the blob”, take your pick - you can be sure that not only is there someone making cultural or actual capital out of it, but that they are muddying waters to make it more difficult to make out the connections, genealogies and human realities underlying what is being discussed. An appeal to take a side in one of these, ultimately aesthetic, judgements – an appeal to show good taste – is an appeal to feel the cringe instead of analysing what one is cringing at. It’s an appeal against scholarship.

Which is why we must, with extreme prejudice, abolish the concept of good taste. “In principle,” said the DJ and dance music producer Chrissy in 2020, “I think the idea of good taste is classist and racist! Usually whatever's considered good taste is what the most powerful or most educated or wealthiest people feel comfortable yelling about, and the ones out of them that can yell loudest and most eloquently about it, as a society we call that good taste.” And he is entirely right. No matter how you define “good taste”, you are defining it as a power relation, an exclusionary tool, a way to deride.

Which is not to say that taste and discernment don’t and shouldn’t exist – but they exist in the sense that scholarship exists. Not ivory tower, status-accrued-by-citations scholarship, but scholarship as in demonstration of knowledge accumulated and the practice of accumulating it. The kind of scholarship that’s as likely – or perhaps more likely – to be exhibited by autodidacts as celebrity professors. You can’t judge scholarship according to winces, grimaces and cringes, you have to take it on according to what it is actually saying about its subjects and objects: and so with taste. Someone’s taste should impress precisely to the degree that they demonstrate that they know and care about the objects of their affection, not for its adherence to a social code imposed by vested interests.

Maybe there are reasons to hope. The early years of this century were formed by information glut, by seemingly all of cultural history being available all at once. Many thought this would lead to cultural paralysis, a dissipation into undifferentiated “conent”, and a death of innovation – and certainly it can be seen to have driven a retreat into reactive and reactionary positions. When bold statement of preference and belonging is made difficult by the baffling array of choice, covertly coded taste bubbles are an inevitable outcome. But two things abode.

Firstly, those genuine old-school style tribes, from cosplayers to grime lovers, who grew up together over years, put in the time together, and truly and positively identified with what they do, and the real spatio-temporal existence of what they do, in defiance of the grimaces of others. Second, the rise in value of curation. It’s a word often derided because of its ubiquity in marketing speech, and mocked because “everyone’s a curator” (or “everyone’s a DJ”) nowadays. But curation at its best is precisely the kind of pride in scholarship and individual ability to map connections across the information ocean, that can short circuit the demands of good taste.

It’s available to all, it can be expressed easily – as punks did with paper fanzines and grime lovers with phone-shot video – and it is by its nature collaborative, sharing, and dependent on positive choices. There ARE glimmers of hope that Generation Z are more able to think in a curatorial way than their predecessors, to cut and paste the always-on data glut of past culture into something more actively expressed than reactively defined – something that can engender a sense of belonging without the need for those gut level micro-rejections of The Other to define itself. And if that is the case, then maybe, just maybe, they can demonstrate new ways to escape the cringe.

#cringe #culture #curation #ingroup #clique #politics #clan #family #echo chamber #aesthetics #good taste #hegemony

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lazywriterkylie · 2 years

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Day 2 writing prompt

*write a radio transcript between a blunt host and a flustered scientist trying to explain their new discovery*

Enjoy I guess?

Radio station crackles to life with the sound of crickets and a babbling brook ambling through the background static. A small garden variety Dwarf in stylish threads sits at his recording desk with his feet on the rough wooden table and a jar of fireflies on his right, and a nervous and hunched figure sits fidgeting on a rough stool to his left, his eyes darting around the small woodland clearing. The dwarf is relaxed, he's leaning back on his mushroom stool and removes his headphones as the current song- Achy Breaky Cauldron- comes to a close. He punches a button in his magik keyboard and pulls his Mike in close:

Host Bink: Good evening Ladies and legumes! You're listening to KIGM! the number one station for the top stardust hits of the current, past, and future century!

(Bink punches a button and the sound of a dragons roar and lute riff punctuate his intro)

Host Bink: stay tuned in my fellow witches and warlocks, because you're in for a trea. This evenings segment I am so excited to welcome a special guest to the show! Say hi Igor!

Igor: (timid and nasal) h-hello listeners!

Host Bink: Igor is coming at us all the way from South of the enchanted forrest where he works as an intern for a renowned gentleman in the field ~of body magik~! (Soundboard of a loud frog croak 🐸)

And let me just say Igor, I am so glad to have the opportunity to talk to you about your research

Igor: thank you Binkley I-I'm glad to be here. The trip was not easy-

Host Bink: -oh I can imagine. With the recent rash of puckwudgie isghting in the Mush-Region I was worried we would have to reschedule or send a rescue knight. But come hades or high water you said you were gonna show for this interview! And here you are!

Igor: Oh of course Binkley, I wouldn't miss it for the realm... plus I'd be d-drawn and quartered if I didn't make it...

Host Bink: well puckwudgies be damed, I know my listeners have been dieing to hear all about your Lordships thrilling discovery. The proclamation he sent out was quite the spectacle! Sprites were flying to every broadcasting station with the scroll- written in your masters hand- proclaiming that you cracked the code to Life Eternal!

Igor: yes- yes very thrilling indeed

Host Bink: Now that is quite the claim Igor! Especially after the similar announcement made last year by the eastern Count followed by his mysterious disappearance- that was the talk of the land and we are still itching for answers. So tell me Igor, is this discovery your master made in the realms of magik or is it through alchemy like the Count's claims?

Igor: A-actually Binkley-

Host Bink: -Call me Bink!

Igor: Bink, eh actually *sniff* so my Master does not use magik. He is a scientist.

Host Bink: Woooah! A scientist! (Sound birad of a banshee shriek) What a character! Science- for those of you listening- is a newly budding branch of magic that centers on the dull and theoretical. In fact our very own residential Wizard spends quite a lot of time debating its legitimacy- for more information on that you can visit the town stump where he regularly nails his proclamations. So Igor back to the question at hand- science? How does one science to achieve Endless Life?

Igor: um, science -is- a legitimate branch of... well, science, and my master uses it to study electrical frequencies from the brain through the body. he uses that electric current to animate-

Host Bink: I'm sorry Igor but help our gentle listeners understand here- electricity? What- what's that? It sounds made up?

Igor: (getting noticeably flustered) I-it's not made up Bink, its a fact. It's the spark of life that makes your mind control your body. It's made out of the same stuff as lightning

Host Bink: Woah! Lightning?? (soundboard sounds of cracking lightning repeatedly crack like dank meme air horns) so you're saying your master uses lightning to wake the dead?

Igor: i mean not really, but in essence. . . Yes?

Host Bink: that sounds an awful lot like magic to me Igor

Igor: (creaks as igor leans forward on his stool) Well, it is a quite complex branch of science, and when things are hard to understand they are often mistaken as magic, and-

Host Bink: it does sound hard to understand Igor. (Cheery generic lute music suddenly kicks up in the background) But you know what's NOT hard to understand Igor? Is Mother Goose Instant Plumb Pudding! Hate the stress of last minute cooking? Sick of being caught unprepared when your wicked step-mother in law drops by for midday tea? Then get Mother Goose Instant Plumb pudding! Made with genuine Little-Jack-Horner plumb substitute, instant pudding is everything you need to make your next garden party a smash hit! Just send a carrier pigeon with six shillings and our code DWARF1 to mother Goose kitchen and recieve an extra 15% off your next pudding order. Again that code is D-W-A-R-F-1, and stop worrying about real cooking today!

Igor:....

Host Bink: ...

Igor: ...right....

Host Bink: so tell me this Igor, is your master's claim to eternal life legitimate? Because it sounds to me like he's just using necromancy- which every little pixie whose gone to primary school knows- is illegal in 9 of our 13 states, and heavily regulated by the king and queen.

Igor: it's most different from necromancy Bink-

Host Bink: -Call me Binkley

Igor: ... (you hear him breath in and pause, then continue) Binkley, it's different because necromancy is raising the dead to do your bidding. These corpses are mindless subjects of the mage who raised him. What my master and I have done is breathe life back into deceased. Actual life!

Host Bink: so what? You take a dead guy, you strike him with lightening, and then he's out doing his gardening the next day? Cuz my half cousin Eddy was a gnome and he got struck by lightning while climbing a beanstalk six years ago and let me tell you- after that zap, that poor shmuck was the opposite of life eternal

Igor: it's way more complicated than that Bink-Binkley! Erm... You are essentially raising new life from old tissue a-and the risen flesh-being-

Host Bink: ew gross Igor don't say flesh being on air like that, we've got sponsors with standards

Igor: Right s-sorry, i mean to say, The subject we are working with is new life. A blank slate. We are teaching him how to wak, how to talk, how to read-

Host Bink: Woah woah! New life? So what the old guy is dead and some new baby-brained guy is using his old lightning body?

Igor: -once again- not really but yes? Its much more complicated than that and truthfully, we still don't fully understand. That's why I'm here Binlley, if we can just get the funding-

Host Bink: Doesn't sound like Life Eternal to me Igor. Sounds to me like Life Recycled. Like my late lalf cousin Eddy-the-gnome, rest his soul, used to say: "one man's trash is another man's cursed relic". Once you're done with something- let it go. I don't want some cursed relic baby-man-corpse walking around in my dead loved ones skin learning how to read.

Igor: but the implications Binkley! THE IMPLICATIONS! Through this successful experiment we are coming closer and closer to learning the origins of the SOUL!

Host Bink: eh, you lost me there Igor. You said this was Life Eternal, and it's not. And you said this isn't necromancy but it sounds like necromancy.

Igor: it's not necromancy Binkley-

Host Bink: -its Necromancy Adjacent-

Igor: (Bam! Slams his hands on the desk shouting) it's science!

(The sounds if crickets stop, and dead air filled by the babbling brook fills the momentary silence)

Igor: it is science! And it's going to change the world as we know it! For better if you accept it, and for worse if you fight it!

Host Bink:... (he punches a key on his sound board and the loud abrasive beray of a donkey plays) Well Igor those are some bold words coming from our friends south of the enchanted forest. Whether it is life or eternal or not, I think what my listeners out there really want to know is this: How Is this science going to impact the current unemployment crisis? Because if we are "breathing life into the dead" !like you claim we are! then how long before dead lightning-baby-men fill essential positions like cauldron scraper, or chamber pot slog?

Igor: (defeated, sighs) I don't know Binkley

Host Bink: well, I'll let you ponder on that, and we will get back to you after our short musical intermission. Coming up next after the add break: Pixie thee Centaur's new hit release "Make your Stable Rock!"

#writing #daily prompt #fantasy #female writers #fic prompt #fiction #faerytale #dnd stuff #fantasywriters #fantasywriting #dnd gnome

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catluvus · 5 months

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michaelbellu · 1 year

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An echo chamber so loud it pops a filter bubble

Blog 2/16

If someone yells into an echo chamber, but no one hears it, does it still create polarization?

The article “Filter bubble,” by Axel Bruns, claims that echo chambers and filter bubbles are not as significant in creating polarization as people think. “The myth of the filter bubble,” above all, “is one thing: a big misunderstanding.” Misunderstanding continues to circulate in public debate, and scholars push back against it by pointing to studies that claim to debunk it.

New media and communication technologies have always undergone a process of individual adaptation and social construction; while not neutral, the technologies and their providers are neither inherently good nor evil in this but can be employed by their users to serve socially and societally beneficial as well as disruptive ends.

The article “The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media,” by Elizabeth Duboisa and Grant Blank, also focuses on echo chambers with a more specific focus on politics. They also claim not to find significance in echo chambers when looking at the entire multi-media environment. The studies show that partisan echo chambers among politically interested could contribute to a growing gap in knowledge between those who are politically interested and those who are not. Greater interest in politics and more media diversity reduces the likelihood of being in an echo chamber. However, the high-choice environment also allows individuals, including those who are politically interested, to consume a wide variety of media, which could lead them to more diverse content and perspectives.

The article “When Birds of a Feather Instagram Together: Debating the Image of Islam in Echo Chambers and Through Trench Warfare on Social Media,” by Zeynep Aydin, Albrecht Fuess, Marcel Förster, and Thijl Sunier, shows that echo chambers do exist and how they can impact large groups of people. This study proves that not only do echo chambers exist within the #CharlieHebdo discussion online, but they can transcend multiple countries.

While echo chambers are built based on political views or personal interest, it is trigger events such as terror attacks that reinforce these filter bubbles. Tweets and likes by “cybermobs,” boost negative sentiments like anti-Muslim hostility and can finally lead to real-life targeting of Muslims.

While it could be argued that the “dank memes” modularity class is relatively low, considering that one user has posted most of the posts, this might not qualify as echo chamber behavior. However, the fact that there are many posts with these specific hashtags and because the individual posts are findable and offer a place for comments to be made qualify this hub as an echo chamber behavior and perhaps an echo chamber in itself.

Despite what data has been shown in studies, I believe that echo chambers and filter bubbles are major reasons for increased polarization. I understand that people have to intentionally seek out information online and that algorithms are not responsible for what people put in them to how the end results. However, whether users intentionally try to see reflective content or not, applications will show them what they “like” to try to keep them on the platform longer.

Throughout the articles, the idea of people using social media and online technology to find differing opinions to learn new perspectives and see what people from the opposing side are saying is unrealistic. Most of the public does not want to see what the other side has to say unless it’s so they can criticize it and belittle it. Some people do that, especially highly educated technology and media-literate users. Outside of college classrooms and other scholarly uses, the majority of people use social media and the internet to confirm ideas they already have and give credibility to their opinions. These users mostly use the differing opinion’s media as ammunition for their arguments and talking points. This behavior promotes filter bubbles and creates echo chambers. In many cases, things may not rise to a full “echo chamber” but still trend in that direction enough to generate more polarization. The idea that the opposite happens and the public will use technology to understand and learn about opposing sides seems unrealistic and utopian.

#echochamber #filterbubble

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doortaste41 · 2 years

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Generate Income Being Funny

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