Another interesting note, I’ve noticed that most of the
sources I see complaining about the filters on Facebook are liberal sources
trying to understand how Trump won. In
turn the Washington post found that these are the people most likely to
unfriend someone over politics, both online and offline (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/21/liberals-are-more-likely-to-unfriend-you-over-politics-online-and-off/).
There is a lot of recent writing on the “smug style” of
liberalism that liberals just seem to have noticed (http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism,
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/liberals-smug-condescending),
and I suspect that this has a lot to do with the filters that others are
complaining about. It’s not just that people
aren’t exposed to others viewpoints, but when they are they instinctively
dismiss them. For instance it’s easy for
a smug liberal to dismiss a conservative as being a dumb uneducated hick, and
in response conservatives can dismiss liberals as arrogant or unconcerned with
their lives. Neither of these are
inherent to technology and I suspect that removing the filters on Facebook
wouldn’t resolve the whole problem.
 |
| The memetic face of "smug liberalism" |
No comments:
Post a Comment