Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:
- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.
- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.
- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.
Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
I feel this is somehow reducing all expression of opinion as performative, i.e. serving to heighten the social standing of the expressor. I have a handful of other motivations:
The activism against “performative” activism is equally grating when it misfires, and the movement probably hasn’t even reached its zenith yet.While others might be like that, the type I'm talking about explicitly does not want to be challenged or alter their worldview. I find a comparison with religion an another poster made to be pretty fair, as the people I know who practice such behavior tend to be either insincere (they don't actually care about politics, but just want to control others) or sincere, but unprepared (they didn't care before, so their ability to form political opinions is still developing).
Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.
Yes but I’d just want to point out that the rub lies in who is deciding which activism is performative and which is authentic. I.e. all of my friends are authentic, all my enemies are performative.
It is mentally exhausting to stay abreast of all issues that humanity faces, no doubt. I’ll agree with you there. But it doesn’t take much energy for me to say, “man what’s happening in Sudan is messed up.”
Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
> the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group
Given our evolutionary history as social animals, this is expected. The genes (and memes, in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) for alienating oneself from the tribe and going solo were less successful than the those for remaining in the tribe. We can reasonably expect such adaptations to include sucking up to alphas to avoid being banished from the tribe, being distressed when outside a group, and feeling good when in a group.
Hate to tell you, there's no such thing as "normal". Other people aren't some monolithic group that think one way.
I don't get it, so do you think "hanging around" is fun or not?
Neurotypical is the word you're looking for, not "normal".
"normal" is a perfectly fine word and there's no reason to criticize someone for using it.
It would be somewhat ironic in this context to be policing the use of normal.
I also would acknowledge the intent of offering neurotypical as an alternative might be kind.
However I also agree "normal" works quite well. It is especially distinguished by the quotes as "normal" and subjective, not normatively valued.
What's normal?
It's a math term whose meaning depends on the qualities of the other people around you, not a reference to any one particular set of characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
"Neurotypical" is the more current and precise term when discussing human behavior, cognition, or neurodevelopment. "Normal" is vague, value-loaded, and scientifically weaker because it implies that neurodivergent people are abnormal rather than simply different. In this context, "neurotypical" is clearer language.
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My favorite is when people are selectively upvote/downvoting a long nested line of argument but fail to notice that the sides "swap" at some point and the voters fail to notice.
Speaks volumes about the community IMO.
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As opposed to treating fact-free rehashings of Israeli state propaganda as 'non-flattering statements' and decorating such treatments with thought-terminating epithets.
I included specific examples from the latest Iran discussion. Flagging responses dead like that is even more thought-terminating than my poor computer geek writing style.
Please respond to those examples in context/a substantive/HN worthy way and have a discussion, not a fact free handwaving of 'they're XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda'. How do the examples I provided break Hacker News guidelines and deserve not only a downvote but to be actively flagged dead? This is a discussion site, not a popularity site. Flagged is not supposed to be used to shape the discussion, but for severe violations of HN guidelines, which the examples do not rise to. The proper response is a response.
It's not a fact-free handwaving; every last one of those comments is just steelmanning Israel's position without any evidential basis. And if you are so deeply concerned about characterizing them as 'XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda', I wonder why you see no reason to push back on claims like this:
>Iran isn’t negotiating in good faith, and will likely need another round of attacks. America should also flood Iran with small arms for the revolutionaries
What kind of productive discussion do you think this encourages? And given that the intelligence community broadly considers the latter a losing proposition, are we to assume that you think they are all Iranian proxies?