Gurri on Biden; Scott A. hearts prediction markets; Kling hearts Randall Collins; Loury and McWhorter on recent kerfluffles; Matt Shapiro and Razib Khan; N.S. Lyons and Katherine Dee
That last quote rings false, to my ears. If anything, the internet blurs these distinctions. Think of how the line between journalist and reader became blurred by blogging and Tweeting over the last 15 years or so. This is true in other areas, as well. To take one example: I started doing a bit of mountain biking during the pandemic. If you look at biking-themed channels on Youtube, there are the professionals like Phil Kmetz who travel to downhill parks all over the US and go bombin' down the gnarliest trails you've ever seen. Those guys have hundreds of thousands of views and subscribers, and they get recognized pretty regularly when they're out and about. But, at the same time, I can also search for trails in my area that I'm interested in potentially riding this summer, and I can find dozens and dozens of videos by regular people who've ridden that trail with a GoPro on, and I get a nice sneak peak of it and I can figure out if it looks like the kind of riding I like to do. These videos often have tens or even ones of views.
These are merely two opposite poles of a spectrum. Back in the day, there was a clear separation between, say, the people who made movies or television shows and the people who consumed them. That distinction doesn't exist anymore. In fact, maybe that has what's made affinity-based identities all the more salient. Before, if you were a Star Wars fan, you might collect Star Wars stuff, you might go to some convention or whatever, you might hang out with other big Star Wars geeks, but it was all a bit consumerist. Now with the internet, it's actually more interactive. You can post your thoughts on the movies or shows or whatever like you're Roger Ebert, you can make videos about this or that aspect of the Star Wars universe, you can write and publish Star Wars fan fiction, etc. Way more engaging than just collecting Star Wars action figures.
That all seems quite right to me. Average may be over for the top content creators, but the tail is amazingly fat.
The pre-internet world was basically one of "passive lurkers by default" for the vast majority of people, whereas the current one has a much wider space of opportunities for interaction and contribution, even if only ten other people in the whole world care about the particular thing you posted.
Indeed, what seems like 'affinity-based' identity is not so easily distinguishable from 'experience-based', precisely because one is able to post and signal and interact and 'contribute to the cause' (or something) or 'retort with sick burns' in a performative way for a particular audience. It is in this way that the whole enthusiasm for the affinity is generated in the first place, precisely because it provides a channel for these experiences that one at least subconsciously calculates as having some possibility of producing personal benefits in esteem or status or popularity.
As you say, the internet 'blurs' the distinction. But then again, that blurring seems to me to be a big contributor to a variety of social-psychological problems out there, to include mental health problems.
As Arnold has pointed out, the 24/7 online smartphone lifestyle and the social media app confuses people about the near and far, the distant and intimate, the remote and familiar.
One thing I've noticed is that people are losing their awareness of the distinction between online and real life in terms of maintaining an awareness of different norms of behavior.
People used to complain about people being much nastier and rowdier online than in real life, which is true, but my point to them was that people have a whole variety of different sets of rules for etiquette and interaction depending on the formality and specifics of the setting, and that there are good reasons to *want* those sets and settings to stay compartmentalized.
People acting online the same way they act in real life is indeterminate as to which mode would dominate, that is, whether they will act nice and polite online, or whether they would start being nasty and impulsive in real life.
Well, it looks like we are getting the convergence now in the collapse of distinctions, and that the online-mode is starting to dominate, so there is "online mindset drift" similar to Fussell's "prole drift".
I don't know about you, but I started to notice people were starting to act in person more and more like they behaved online even before the pandemic, but the trend in this tendency has accelerated off the charts after two years of covid-world stress. My hunch is that it's due to lack of sufficient negative feedback in real-life social interactions, of the type that tends to keep people well-adjusted and course-corrected, the kind of thing that hermits and castaways don't get, likely why a lot of them slowly go quirky then half-nuts.
Another example is that people who work from home a lot more now are forgetting themselves and how to act when they are in the office and around people again, no longer able to appreciate the distinction and no longer maintaining a tight association in their mind between place, context, and appropriate modes of behavior. 'Blurred' again.
Oh, I agree completely. I did not mean to give the impression that the eroding border between content creator and consumer was necessarily a good thing. I think your description of the real world effects are pretty spot on.
On Collins: Another downstream effect of CDC/FDA foreclosing the use of massive screening testing of the asymptomatic to reduce the costs of reducing spread in anticipation of vaccinations/improved therapies.
That last quote rings false, to my ears. If anything, the internet blurs these distinctions. Think of how the line between journalist and reader became blurred by blogging and Tweeting over the last 15 years or so. This is true in other areas, as well. To take one example: I started doing a bit of mountain biking during the pandemic. If you look at biking-themed channels on Youtube, there are the professionals like Phil Kmetz who travel to downhill parks all over the US and go bombin' down the gnarliest trails you've ever seen. Those guys have hundreds of thousands of views and subscribers, and they get recognized pretty regularly when they're out and about. But, at the same time, I can also search for trails in my area that I'm interested in potentially riding this summer, and I can find dozens and dozens of videos by regular people who've ridden that trail with a GoPro on, and I get a nice sneak peak of it and I can figure out if it looks like the kind of riding I like to do. These videos often have tens or even ones of views.
These are merely two opposite poles of a spectrum. Back in the day, there was a clear separation between, say, the people who made movies or television shows and the people who consumed them. That distinction doesn't exist anymore. In fact, maybe that has what's made affinity-based identities all the more salient. Before, if you were a Star Wars fan, you might collect Star Wars stuff, you might go to some convention or whatever, you might hang out with other big Star Wars geeks, but it was all a bit consumerist. Now with the internet, it's actually more interactive. You can post your thoughts on the movies or shows or whatever like you're Roger Ebert, you can make videos about this or that aspect of the Star Wars universe, you can write and publish Star Wars fan fiction, etc. Way more engaging than just collecting Star Wars action figures.
That all seems quite right to me. Average may be over for the top content creators, but the tail is amazingly fat.
The pre-internet world was basically one of "passive lurkers by default" for the vast majority of people, whereas the current one has a much wider space of opportunities for interaction and contribution, even if only ten other people in the whole world care about the particular thing you posted.
Indeed, what seems like 'affinity-based' identity is not so easily distinguishable from 'experience-based', precisely because one is able to post and signal and interact and 'contribute to the cause' (or something) or 'retort with sick burns' in a performative way for a particular audience. It is in this way that the whole enthusiasm for the affinity is generated in the first place, precisely because it provides a channel for these experiences that one at least subconsciously calculates as having some possibility of producing personal benefits in esteem or status or popularity.
As you say, the internet 'blurs' the distinction. But then again, that blurring seems to me to be a big contributor to a variety of social-psychological problems out there, to include mental health problems.
As Arnold has pointed out, the 24/7 online smartphone lifestyle and the social media app confuses people about the near and far, the distant and intimate, the remote and familiar.
One thing I've noticed is that people are losing their awareness of the distinction between online and real life in terms of maintaining an awareness of different norms of behavior.
People used to complain about people being much nastier and rowdier online than in real life, which is true, but my point to them was that people have a whole variety of different sets of rules for etiquette and interaction depending on the formality and specifics of the setting, and that there are good reasons to *want* those sets and settings to stay compartmentalized.
People acting online the same way they act in real life is indeterminate as to which mode would dominate, that is, whether they will act nice and polite online, or whether they would start being nasty and impulsive in real life.
Well, it looks like we are getting the convergence now in the collapse of distinctions, and that the online-mode is starting to dominate, so there is "online mindset drift" similar to Fussell's "prole drift".
I don't know about you, but I started to notice people were starting to act in person more and more like they behaved online even before the pandemic, but the trend in this tendency has accelerated off the charts after two years of covid-world stress. My hunch is that it's due to lack of sufficient negative feedback in real-life social interactions, of the type that tends to keep people well-adjusted and course-corrected, the kind of thing that hermits and castaways don't get, likely why a lot of them slowly go quirky then half-nuts.
Another example is that people who work from home a lot more now are forgetting themselves and how to act when they are in the office and around people again, no longer able to appreciate the distinction and no longer maintaining a tight association in their mind between place, context, and appropriate modes of behavior. 'Blurred' again.
Oh, I agree completely. I did not mean to give the impression that the eroding border between content creator and consumer was necessarily a good thing. I think your description of the real world effects are pretty spot on.
On Collins: Another downstream effect of CDC/FDA foreclosing the use of massive screening testing of the asymptomatic to reduce the costs of reducing spread in anticipation of vaccinations/improved therapies.