RE: Restriction of debates
In the discussion of public discourse,
The clear message becomes - don't bother speaking up...unless you're willing to fight to the death for it (really important). Otherwise, shut-up and keep your head down.
Well, that has its place but really what's been lost is agreement/understanding of rules of edicate regarding hypothetical or exploratory topics. What would happen if I wrote a story where the entire world outlawed something? Now my creative work would be a work of fiction but blasted as anti-this and such and such. The story might actually show this outlawing to be bad in the end (the message of most science fiction), but that doesn't even matter. Just proposing such a thing gets people arguing, and I'm sure we don't know the hate mail that famous authors of fictional works have received since the dawn of time. In the long, long, ago...you had to type up a letter and pay to mail it...ughh...only the really mad found the time to do that.
Now, it's free! That's right, free (literally, no cost) messaging has lowered the barrier so anyone can send any dumb idea and it didn't cost them anything. So the importance and level of communication has dropped (just like the quality of handwriting, it isn't really needed to effectively communicate) as the volume has increased. We message people about really dumb topics, because we can.
To trolls, to argue with them, is to make a personal challenge to their very being and beliefs, and instead of withstanding (steadfast) the comment and having the resolve to rise above it, they descend to cause harm due to disagreement.
In the old days we might say this behavior is childish.... maybe that's the best way to put it. I guess I'm old enough where my parents were about "toughening you up" to stand up to playground bullies, you learned to harden your exterior and ignore the haters...now it's reversed. It's a nice idea to stop bullying...but it's part of animal nature (pecking order) and I've encountered more "bullying" at work as an adult then I ever did as a child. So, I'm glad I was taught to deal with it because life isn't fair, and people do argue and bully and such. You diffuse those situations but stopping it from going too far.
Now it's encouraged to let it get it overblown and out of hand to the point that people feel threatened.
Sometimes when someone says something you don't like...you just take it...ignore it...and move on with life. Now we have to deal with the luxury of people who don't have to and the low-cost of modern electronic communication means more people say more things (often without really thinking) and then the sea of comments churns on it.
I’ll also put in one last thing…often (not always) the upset person, who’s reading, isn’t actually experienced enough in reading to understand what they’ve just read. My instructor had a great lesson on this, he’d say “readers love to make up their own meaning, if they come across a word or phrase they don’t understand, they won’t stop to look it up, they will make up their own meaning and proceed to keep reading. So our job is to be as clear as possible because this is actually human nature”.
To me, this is actually the dirty secret issue that modern man faces. People aren’t too stupid to read, they are too inexperienced in reading to properly interpret what they’ve read. Because what they currently spend their time reading isn’t published works and such…it’s tweets and comments. Incomplete sentences. Fragmented thoughts.
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