31–40 of 61 posts
What's new is its weaponization as a tool for political control in the West.
Witch hunts are nothing new; people have been doing this for as long as there have been people. I'd even go so far as to say the mass media have been doing this for at least 150 years now. What's new is its weaponization as a tool for political control in the West.
The word "censure" doesn't appear once in The Fine Article, which, I think, undermines its point a little. He writes with nuance about witnessing without judgement, but then assumes all this behavior is categorically "shaming". There is a legitimate social value to censure, and some of this stuff is absolutely censure, not shaming. To clarify my terms, "censure" talks about behaviors: "That is not an okay thing to do…
Your distinctions between shame and censure are arbitrary and meaningless. e.g.: Censure: "You shouldn't have done that." Shaming: "You shouldn't have done that. Shame on you." The point is the same. If an action is deservedly shameful, then so be it. Shame that brings positive change is not a bad thing; it is a natural social consequence. The problem is lack of forgiveness even after repentance. How can one's debt t…
If anything, repentance leads to more and longer lasting stigma. The repentant person will most likely get excluded from the polite society - which usually means from any high-profile business and social setting.
Meanwhile standing staunchly by one's actions (or strong denial) - even better if coupled with some pushback - tends to create a counter-narrative, with its own team of supporters.
Not saying this is right or wrong, merely that showing weakness in the face of metaphorically bloodthirsty crowd tends to lead to worse results than standing up for oneself.
This is getting pretty bad. The thing that really bugs me is when people are shamed for things they did 20 or 30 years ago. 20 years ago I was prank calling people and saying some pretty awful stuff to them. Would I do it now? No, of course not. I've changed. Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I guess there's a balance, though. If I had questionable character now…
Awsome. Here's all of them. Sincerely, Internet
This is getting pretty bad. The thing that really bugs me is when people are shamed for things they did 20 or 30 years ago. 20 years ago I was prank calling people and saying some pretty awful stuff to them. Would I do it now? No, of course not. I've changed. Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I guess there's a balance, though. If I had questionable character now…
It isn't just the older generation (and actions done 20-30 years ago) doing dumb things and getting shamed for it. The newer generation grows up without learning the implications of mass surveillance, mass long-term storage, mass searching and indexing, and encountering driven people looking to shame others just for fun. (example: one of the kids of the parents accused in the college admission scandal tweeted about "…
> I know I'll be different in 20-30 years in the future,
Psychologist Wendell Johnson, pointed out that we create many problems for ourselves by using Static Language to express or capture a reality that is ever changing -
“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, good and bad, right and wrong, about similarities and normals and kinds, about simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.”
"really bad people" is an example of that static constraint on language. People are not static but ever changing (which all our marketers are very conscious off which is why we get an iphone 4,5,6,7 etc not just an iphone).
To get people to accept that reality is dynamic, social media and news media have to reflect on their signaling. Signals like clicks/views/likes/retweets/upvotes all reinforce static world views.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Need some sort of exponential weighted moving average function: weight most recent the most.
It's not just time-based though. Most of us can probably recall recent examples where someone did or said something stupid or in poor taste. But they didn't deserve to lose their job or even had their career badly damaged because that was the easiest way for some company to placate the Internet mob.
It's as if rather than fining people for littering, there's no fine and no enforcement, but every now and again someone gets attacked by anti-littering terrorists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think these questions have legible answers. Before social media, someone might smear, criticize or judge you for prank calls you made 20 years ago. Some wouldn't. It's not court. The difference between then and now is implications. The world we're in now can take those criticisms and amplify them, making them the central theme if your public persona. It can becone thing people know about you first. In an impo…
> Before social media, someone might smear, criticize or judge you for prank calls you made 20 years ago This sort of thing used to be a staple of small-town life; everyone knew everything that you ever did and you could be defined by a childhood incident. The only way out of it was to leave. Now we have made the world smaller.
This is getting pretty bad. The thing that really bugs me is when people are shamed for things they did 20 or 30 years ago. 20 years ago I was prank calling people and saying some pretty awful stuff to them. Would I do it now? No, of course not. I've changed. Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I guess there's a balance, though. If I had questionable character now…
Of course, that seems absurd. But comedians are fired for jokes they made years ago when they come to light. Was the joke bad? Probably. By today's standards and the standards that we hold comedians to. But back then times were different and the joke may have been more culturally acceptable. Moreso they have refined their style and grown. As you said, they've changed.
It's incredibly frustrating because the shame culture only exists to eat itself alive. You could be a picture perfect person one day and the next be demonized by something you don't even remember doing from years ago.
This is getting pretty bad. The thing that really bugs me is when people are shamed for things they did 20 or 30 years ago. 20 years ago I was prank calling people and saying some pretty awful stuff to them. Would I do it now? No, of course not. I've changed. Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I guess there's a balance, though. If I had questionable character now…
This is especially interesting when it comes to comedians being fired for tweets/work they made in the past. I've heard it compared to being fired for ones current coding position because one has 10 year old code on their github that is trash / poor quality. Of course, that seems absurd. But comedians are fired for jokes they made years ago when they come to light. Was the joke bad? Probably. By today's standards and…