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>your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree // Cancelling people isn't just disagreeing. Of course

>your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree // Cancelling people isn't just disagreeing. Of course people can disagree -- but those who do disagree take the disagreement to other fora and greater levels. An audience member can always heckle, it's expected to some level, but if you follow a comedian home and harass them it's entirely different.

atoav 5y ago
This is a consequence of twitter being a different place than what people are used to: - your opinion will not be bound to where you say it (your local pub), but potentially visible to anyone on earth - your opinion will not be bound to the time you say it like in verbal speech, but might re-emerge at any point in time - your opinion might be seen as a public statement (or even a declaration) to the world - the friction to post your opinion, to react to your opinion or to jump on bandwaggons is as low as it gets This is fundamentally different from any place you could speech in ever before in history, yet most people speak the same way they might in their local pub after the third beer. This impedance mismatch produces all kinds of wonky results. The bandwaggon problem is yet another class of problem, that is much more systemically rooted and could probably be addressed by introducing a little bit of friction in the right places. My hunch is that this is less of a culture problem showing up on twitter, but a twitter problem showing up in culture. Certain forms of media make certain forms of communication more likely while preventing others due to their systems of communications. Twitters systems make such phenomena more likely, so they show up more often.
- largbae 5y ago
  I agree with most of what you're saying here, but those who get discussed on Twitter are not always tweeters. You can get dragged to the public square by someone who takes a video of you at that proverbial local pub.
  - atoav 5y ago
    True. The media spotlight can shine on everybody and improve or destroy lives. This was also true with boulevard press before social media. Within social media this can take the shape of a angry mob with torches and pitchforks — and this is certainly undesireable. My point however was that this is not "a new school of thought" which has been emerging in the past decade or so, but this is emergent behaviour which stems from the communicative system social media has designed. What people might call cancel culture is therefore not a culture that somehow went and inflitrated social media, but instead a culture that formed precisely in reaction to or enabled by the communicative structures of social media. The consequence of this would be that the only way to get rid of online mobs would be to change the design of online interaction on those platforms (e.g. by limiting post visibility, adding friction on retweeting and sharing, highlighting options to privately communicatiate etc).

atoav 5y ago

This is a consequence of twitter being a different place than what people are used to: - your opinion will not be bound to where you say it (your local pub), but potentially visible to anyone on earth - your opinion will not be bound to the time you say it like in verbal speech, but might re-emerge at any point in time - your opinion might be seen as a public statement (or even a declaration) to the world - the friction to post your opinion, to react to your opinion or to jump on bandwaggons is as low as it gets This is fundamentally different from any place you could speech in ever before in history, yet most people speak the same way they might in their local pub after the third beer. This impedance mismatch produces all kinds of wonky results. The bandwaggon problem is yet another class of problem, that is much more systemically rooted and could probably be addressed by introducing a little bit of friction in the right places. My hunch is that this is less of a culture problem showing up on twitter, but a twitter problem showing up in culture. Certain forms of media make certain forms of communication more likely while preventing others due to their systems of communications. Twitters systems make such phenomena more likely, so they show up more often.

largbae 5y ago
I agree with most of what you're saying here, but those who get discussed on Twitter are not always tweeters. You can get dragged to the public square by someone who takes a video of you at that proverbial local pub.
- atoav 5y ago
  True. The media spotlight can shine on everybody and improve or destroy lives. This was also true with boulevard press before social media. Within social media this can take the shape of a angry mob with torches and pitchforks — and this is certainly undesireable. My point however was that this is not "a new school of thought" which has been emerging in the past decade or so, but this is emergent behaviour which stems from the communicative system social media has designed. What people might call cancel culture is therefore not a culture that somehow went and inflitrated social media, but instead a culture that formed precisely in reaction to or enabled by the communicative structures of social media. The consequence of this would be that the only way to get rid of online mobs would be to change the design of online interaction on those platforms (e.g. by limiting post visibility, adding friction on retweeting and sharing, highlighting options to privately communicatiate etc).