This is why even attempts at captions or “constructive” criticism in the story of the helicopter, aimed at both the original story and Neon Yang in the months that followed, only add to pain and anger. The sheer weight and mass of so many people on an individual at once becomes powerfully destructive, even if many of them appear “nice”.
How did this come to be? The answer is twofold: design and dissociation.
Road design in countries like the Netherlands promote what is known as “soothing traffic”, reducing pedestrian deaths and car accidents; in contrast, North American road design encourages high-speed driving, motivating drivers to passively press the accelerator, giving them less time to stop, even in crowded areas. Understood this way, you can get away from the individualistic stories of accidents — about bad drivers or “unseen pedestrians” — and focus on how design encourages The results are broadly not attributable to any single agent.
Similarly, social media is designed in a way that stimulates its traffic rather than pacifies. It focuses on, rather than restricts, the augmented reality aspects that arise from computer use – tricking you into believing you are somewhere that is not reality.
You see, nearly all internet use is essentially dissociative, causing us to subtly divorce us from the consequences of our words and actions — what psychologist John Suler calls to be “Dissociated Imagination.” In my own research, I came to this conclusion the other way around, arguing that on the net gaming space, the pretense of video game magic circles allows people to extend the game’s unreality into their own words and actions. But eventually I realized that it’s not just games that have this effect. It’s the whole online space, all nasty and ridiculous.
Having a charming quality to post into the void, a strip of Möbius feels that you are the one looking for no one maybe Viewers, and exhibitors, people need to Have you seen.
If it’s So, good intentions are easily perverted by the background, so perhaps the fault lies with the binary stars rather than ourselves. Like most structural problems, from ongoing pandemics to climate change to pervasive inequality exacerbating the devastation of both, we cannot fool ourselves when believe that extra personal morality will be enough to fix the problem — especially when everyone makes a comment that feels ethical in every way.
Of course, that does not mean that you are not responsible when using social networks. For example, in both the helicopter story and the heist comic, many of the progressives who joined the attack began with rumors started by right-wing harassers spreading intentionally false information. deviated. Letting go of the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” mentality we all have about internet captioning can only serve us well.
But sometimes there’s simply nothing to say will not troubling, which is one of many reasons why the recurring appearance of discourse thoughts on Twitter masquerading as dispatches from the front lines of the “Culture Wars” is possible. The idea that there are some groups of left-wing power users on Twitter convening at a summit to set the right level of irony for their tweets, as if setting oil production quotas at OPEC, has always been is absurd.
