I recall when movies were condemned by the Catholic Anti-defamation League, it was one rich old woman and her priest. And they didn't watch the movies.
‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
241–250 of 674 posts
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#242Reminds me of the research NPR did before closing their comments section. >In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...
Is this unusual for online forums? It's been a rule of thumb for decades that 1-5% of users are active posters and everyone else is what used to be called a "lurker" - there to read and be informed/outraged/entertained.
I'd expect the same for politics. Of course politics affects everyone personally in all kinds of ways, but most of the population just isn't that interested.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#243You know I don't recall hearing the term "culture war" when I was studying critical theory and culture and media and so on at university last decade.. I heard about hegemony, and how theories of cultural transmission have changed over time.. I heard of Edward Said and his The Myth of the “Clash of Civilizations”, I heard of Virilio's "Pure War" of technology vs humanity... but I can't recall any discussion of a cultu…
Well, that's obvious. Social sciences that describe societies usually lag behind the events they describe. That's natural. It's also true for other sciences. You won't learn cutting edge Physics in your lecture class. You'll learn the established stuff. It takes a long time till you attend lectures where you'll hear that stuff and it won't be general admission.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#244Reminds me of the research NPR did before closing their comments section. >In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...
Is this unusual for online forums? It's been a rule of thumb for decades that 1-5% of users are active posters and everyone else is what used to be called a "lurker" - there to read and be informed/outraged/entertained. I'd expect the same for politics. Of course politics affects everyone personally in all kinds of ways, but most of the population just isn't that interested.
1-5% is very different from 0.06% though.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#245I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's hel…
>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the…
Sorry, in what way are the dominant social media websites (Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit in particular), NOT main stream media in 2020?
Certainly they aren't part of the legacy media, but they all seem to carry water for the same narratives and ideologies.
The non-mainstream media is publications that people in polite urban mostly-coastal American culture sneer at: Breitbart, The Post Millenial, Reason, Parler, Gab, specific independent journalists on some of the mainstream platforms, etc.
But certainly Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are media and they are mainstream. And they have demonstrated their willingness to censor stories with more or less the same bias (in the same ideological direction) as the mainstream legacy media. They're just the mainstream new media.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
The proportion in the UK who are any kind of Marxist is vanishingly small. The extremist pushing "culture wars" do like to argue it's about "Marxist ideology", but what they paint as Marxist rarely has anything whatsoever to do with Marxism. EDIT: It's fascinating to see the votes on this change without anyone even trying to make an argument to justify the claim it has to do with Marxism. I'd love to see one of those…
Jeremy Corbyn has praised Karl Marx as "a great economist", FWIW.
Obviously he was that and a foundational social scientist. I'll do that and I'm almost certainly closer to being an ancap than you are.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#247I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's hel…
>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media.
It's driven by any participant who is making money from the political process. This includes MSM, Social Media, Political Consultants, and on and on.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first describes a quasi-religious ritual in which all participants ritually affirm that they are unworthy sinners, racists. Those who believe get the satisfaction of publicly proclaiming their sin, signaling their superiority over the outsiders. Those who don’t believe have their faces rubbed in the fact that other people have the power to make them lie in public about who they are and what they believe. It shows…
> The first describes a quasi-religious ritual in which all participants ritually affirm that they are unworthy sinners, racists. Why would being racist make someone an unworthy sinner? Racism is just treating others differently based on their race. It’s not weird or evil. In fact, it’s perfectly normal and even understandable. Humans have probably always separated themselves into groups. Even chimpanzees do it. I th…
> Are you sure you’re not the extremist? You seem to have an axe to grind.
I'm sure once you're downvoted to invisibility, you're takeaway will be that "HN is a bunch of extremists", instead of the more reasonable "why are a bunch of mild-mannered software developers whose culture has always been open to different types of people strongly disagreeing with what I say?".
Could it be that we see a danger in this that you do not? It's seems fairly obvious to me that our country is starting to crumble around us. Perhaps you're living in a situation where that's not apparant.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#249That's not particularly surprising. The core of the US Revolutionary movement was very small relative to the total population
Indeed. I mean, one guy made a system out of the concept, and ended up taking over one of the biggest countries on the planet some 100 years ago. Anyone serious about political technique has known this since forever.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neil Postman wrote in 1985: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism." "Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley fe…
Neil Postman's books influenced me tremendously. I've been rereading McLuhan, Postman, Huxley, etc. Manufacturing Consent is the most directly applicable to understanding social media. With at least two updates to the thesis. #1 The outrage machine is fueled by advertising, right? What's new is the motivating control (choice) moved from the advertiser's intent to the algorithmic recommenders. #2 Third parties learned…
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