Thanks for sharing this, Asa! I agree that we have a problem with dialogue on social media, but I'm not sure that this matters as long as dialogue still takes place. And even online, it does. I begin to wonder if our situation is not as bad as it seems.
It's like driving. A single bad driver can make us doubt humanity as a whole, but they are the strict minority of drivers. They just happen to stand out more precisely because they are so offensive with their driving! So it is with the outragers online. Aye, it's always depressing to witness. But when the prudent people choose to say nothing, what would we expect our social media encounters to be like...?
Hi Chris. Thanks for weighing in. I'm afraid I'll have to disagree. My circles are unfortunately majority social media deranged. It's like a switch was flipped some years ago and they're kinda broken. They start mic dropping almost immediately when I run into them, and I have to tell them frequently that I don't want to hear about their politics. This isn't "on social media"... This is leakage into the real world. Usually, these are folks who have been raving for death to unvaxxed and such. We're talking the whole liberal outrage kit. I met someone just two months ago who yelled at me for an hour on a liberal subject. And I barely opened my mouth. I tried to explain this notion about avatars and not dialoguing with the person in front of her, but there was simply zero communication possible. Again... this is the real world, not online. The world now needs therapists who address this subject specifically. It's making people very sick.
Thanks for your testimony! This isn't my experience... but that doesn't mean I doubt your account. On the contrary, I find it depressingly unsurprising.
Let me hypothesise that this infection of face-to-face discourse by nonsense cultivated online occurs in certain contexts and not others. It was not the case in working class Manchester before I left the UK, and it is not obviously the case in middle class Tennessee where I now live. But I'll bet there are a great many places where your account is the norm (especially, perhaps, in academia, which I have cut ties with).
The cognitive dissonance is so palpable online, how could it not be leaking out elsewhere...?
With unlimited love,
Chris.
PS: "the whole liberal outrage kit" made me chuckle! 😂 As someone who considers himself liberal, I have not lost my sense of humour about all the illiberal liberals. 😁
Good that my humour is appreciated, Chris. There is a conservative outrage kit, but I find those in my circles on the right to be more open to dialogue. That's in the real world. Online, the two sides are equally horrible. They deserve each other.
Marvelous. I loved the essay and the striking poem, itself a journey out of the ordinary into the new. When I used to write scholarly books, I slowly realized that very few people actually read them, even parts of them, and perhaps then only to see if they were mentioned in the index (a habit had myself). New eyes, to refer to the quote mentioned by HN below, come, for me, with writing, sometimes even writing something as simple as a thank-you note or a comment like the one I am making here. I came to see that it did not matter if I lacked the kind of readers I thought of when I wrote. What was important for me was to write. I never tried to set a familiar idea into writing without realizing that the idea was not so familiar after all, that writing about it took 5 times longer than I had expected, and that it was harder to complete. I had a great editor once who said "you have to stop writing" (meaning stop fussing with this word and that paragraph and get the manuscript to me). If it was hard to write, it was also, oddly, hard to stop writing. Thanks for bringing all this to mind.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Allen. "Fussing" is the right word... though I do believe it is expected of writers. A humorous observation I've maintained for some years now is that poets, the fussiest of writers, are kinda OCD. The discipline of writing definitely encourages obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and it can leak out into other things they do.
I thought of you when I read the following yesterday. This is a marvelous novel about somewhat-related experiences that 3 people have in India. The stories are about how difficult it is to read signals in an unfamiliar culture. This is a description of an Indian who works for a tech firm.
“He was a spiritual soul, his pieties were obvious in the office, yet he had the manner of an accountant—discreet, overcautious, revealing nothing, but giving off a distinct hum of repressed fuss. Something of the Indian businessman informed the spiritual man, with his credit and debit columns in the ledger of karma.”
Paul Theroux, The Elephanta Suite (2007), p. 176.
--hum of repressed fuss, I thought that was choice.
The ideas you illustrate here about paradigms and the metaphors that govern them confining us, so to speak, to seeing the world in a certain way reminds me of a quote attributed to Marcel Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." The quotation resonates deeply with me because it reflects certain paradigm shifts I've undergone over the last five years, shifts that have been extraordinarily painful but also liberating and consciousness-expanding. It's ultimately a wonderful thing to see the world with new eyes, that is, a new paradigm with new metaphors, because a whole new vista of understanding about human nature and the human condition and our place in the universe comes into view, which is very exciting, indeed. The attendant metaphor of rebirth is, to me, one of the most potent and truthful in man's storytelling repertoire about the experience of living life fully and meaningfully and with an open heart, of becoming holy.
Transformation of consciousness and rebirth are key ideas here. I shy away, however, from the notion of holiness because it can represent one of those traps of enlightenment.
Thanks for sharing this, Asa! I agree that we have a problem with dialogue on social media, but I'm not sure that this matters as long as dialogue still takes place. And even online, it does. I begin to wonder if our situation is not as bad as it seems.
It's like driving. A single bad driver can make us doubt humanity as a whole, but they are the strict minority of drivers. They just happen to stand out more precisely because they are so offensive with their driving! So it is with the outragers online. Aye, it's always depressing to witness. But when the prudent people choose to say nothing, what would we expect our social media encounters to be like...?
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
Hi Chris. Thanks for weighing in. I'm afraid I'll have to disagree. My circles are unfortunately majority social media deranged. It's like a switch was flipped some years ago and they're kinda broken. They start mic dropping almost immediately when I run into them, and I have to tell them frequently that I don't want to hear about their politics. This isn't "on social media"... This is leakage into the real world. Usually, these are folks who have been raving for death to unvaxxed and such. We're talking the whole liberal outrage kit. I met someone just two months ago who yelled at me for an hour on a liberal subject. And I barely opened my mouth. I tried to explain this notion about avatars and not dialoguing with the person in front of her, but there was simply zero communication possible. Again... this is the real world, not online. The world now needs therapists who address this subject specifically. It's making people very sick.
Thanks for your testimony! This isn't my experience... but that doesn't mean I doubt your account. On the contrary, I find it depressingly unsurprising.
Let me hypothesise that this infection of face-to-face discourse by nonsense cultivated online occurs in certain contexts and not others. It was not the case in working class Manchester before I left the UK, and it is not obviously the case in middle class Tennessee where I now live. But I'll bet there are a great many places where your account is the norm (especially, perhaps, in academia, which I have cut ties with).
The cognitive dissonance is so palpable online, how could it not be leaking out elsewhere...?
With unlimited love,
Chris.
PS: "the whole liberal outrage kit" made me chuckle! 😂 As someone who considers himself liberal, I have not lost my sense of humour about all the illiberal liberals. 😁
Good that my humour is appreciated, Chris. There is a conservative outrage kit, but I find those in my circles on the right to be more open to dialogue. That's in the real world. Online, the two sides are equally horrible. They deserve each other.
Marvelous. I loved the essay and the striking poem, itself a journey out of the ordinary into the new. When I used to write scholarly books, I slowly realized that very few people actually read them, even parts of them, and perhaps then only to see if they were mentioned in the index (a habit had myself). New eyes, to refer to the quote mentioned by HN below, come, for me, with writing, sometimes even writing something as simple as a thank-you note or a comment like the one I am making here. I came to see that it did not matter if I lacked the kind of readers I thought of when I wrote. What was important for me was to write. I never tried to set a familiar idea into writing without realizing that the idea was not so familiar after all, that writing about it took 5 times longer than I had expected, and that it was harder to complete. I had a great editor once who said "you have to stop writing" (meaning stop fussing with this word and that paragraph and get the manuscript to me). If it was hard to write, it was also, oddly, hard to stop writing. Thanks for bringing all this to mind.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Allen. "Fussing" is the right word... though I do believe it is expected of writers. A humorous observation I've maintained for some years now is that poets, the fussiest of writers, are kinda OCD. The discipline of writing definitely encourages obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and it can leak out into other things they do.
I thought of you when I read the following yesterday. This is a marvelous novel about somewhat-related experiences that 3 people have in India. The stories are about how difficult it is to read signals in an unfamiliar culture. This is a description of an Indian who works for a tech firm.
“He was a spiritual soul, his pieties were obvious in the office, yet he had the manner of an accountant—discreet, overcautious, revealing nothing, but giving off a distinct hum of repressed fuss. Something of the Indian businessman informed the spiritual man, with his credit and debit columns in the ledger of karma.”
Paul Theroux, The Elephanta Suite (2007), p. 176.
--hum of repressed fuss, I thought that was choice.
The ideas you illustrate here about paradigms and the metaphors that govern them confining us, so to speak, to seeing the world in a certain way reminds me of a quote attributed to Marcel Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." The quotation resonates deeply with me because it reflects certain paradigm shifts I've undergone over the last five years, shifts that have been extraordinarily painful but also liberating and consciousness-expanding. It's ultimately a wonderful thing to see the world with new eyes, that is, a new paradigm with new metaphors, because a whole new vista of understanding about human nature and the human condition and our place in the universe comes into view, which is very exciting, indeed. The attendant metaphor of rebirth is, to me, one of the most potent and truthful in man's storytelling repertoire about the experience of living life fully and meaningfully and with an open heart, of becoming holy.
Transformation of consciousness and rebirth are key ideas here. I shy away, however, from the notion of holiness because it can represent one of those traps of enlightenment.
I hear you. I've come to think of holiness in the sense of feeling "whole" by developing a balance between physical and mental health.
and...
communism is the dissolution* of distrust.
(* dissolving).