the dilemma of seeing a post you disagree with, and wanting to point out what you consider harmful about the message
If you say something in comments or reblogs, you get a fight. And the post gets more attention than it should get.
If you post on your own blog about it, or vaguepost, or say nothing at all– then all the people sharing that original post uncritically may never get exposed to ANY other viewpoints about its message. And they go on thinking everyone in the world agrees with it– or that whoever disagrees is a weird stranger they’ll never have to meet.
This is how Internet communities break up into bubbles, which then radicalize into stuff ranging from conspiracy theory cults, to puriteens, to incels
But if you try to think “how do we stop it,” all that comes to mind is “lots of people need to be ready to argue with strangers on the internet”…. and i kinda feel like that is also part of what contributes to the problem?
Self-reblogging this like putting salve on a mosquito bite I know I shouldn’t scratch, because I need to hold myself back from making a particular reply to a particular comment on a particular post
Which I absolutely got myself into, and have no one to blame but myself really
because I reblogged someone’s thread– which overall I liked, and didn’t even have much disagreement with –
but, in my foolishness or my cranky mood, not sure why, I added a critical comment about the way the thread was structured
And the OP has now replied to me (bizarrely, not in a reblog but in a comment, meaning that everyone can see their reply but no one can see what it’s in response to?)
and their comment is just… wildly misinterpreting what my criticism was.
But this argument is absolutely not worth ANY of my time
And if it was actually an important disagreement, then, sure, I’d be troubled by the above-mentioned dilemma.
But as it is, I’m just driven to remind myself that… sometimes we should really just not engage. I shouldn’t have originally, and I shouldn’t now.
I think the shared thread between these thoughts is that being more open to debate would often be a good thing… If we were generally better at debating.
In the sense of treating each other civilly while disagreeing…but also in having better skills at communicating our points, and understanding what points someone else is trying to communicate.
it’s regrettable how much we fall into the habit, on the internet, of expressing dissenting viewpoints in ways that just turn into counterproductive fighting.
Not just in an individual way but collectively. One person improving communication skills cannot fix it. Even when I believe I have a very clear, well-reasoned, and tactfully worded counterpoint to an argument, I know that in most cases it’s futile to bring it up– because no matter how reasonable and polite it is, other people in the argument will misinterpret and jump to the worst conclusion about everything about it, from the meaning of each word to the original motivation for saying it.
The sort of people who jump straight from “this person is expressing disagreement with something I said” to “this person is my arch nemesis, set against all my most deeply held ethical beliefs”…. are people at least somewhat bubbled inside an echo chamber already, shielded from disagreement to the point of being unable to handle it.
And it’s likely that most of us already are, to some degree. Different degrees, different values of how likely it is we’ll ever change.