My echo chamber
Deadspin founder and Cardinals fan Will Leitch writes this week that the internet "echo chamber" has been a damaging development. He believes that allowing fanatics to find safe havens of support against dissent and to easily block out opposing viewpoints has turned us all into "the New York Post."This virtually unlimited access to information, however, can only be viewed as a positive. I value the new openness in lunacy, also. Worrying that racists, for example, will now find the online support to more freely express their twisted views is wasted effort. I, for one, am glad to know that this echo chamber emboldens my cousin to express her racist views on Facebook because I'm going to assume she already held these views before the World Wide Web came along. The only thing more dangerous than open racism is hidden racism.
I take Leitch's point about niche cultures, and he's right that it can be demoralizing and exhausting to watch, but returning to my example: worrying that the 10 percent of Americans that are racist extremists can now more easily commune with each other falsely assumes that 10 percent of Americans are racist extremists when the percentage is more like 70.
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I hope you had a nice Christmas if that's a thing you do.
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I'm not going to defend ugly sweater culture, but the trendy new holiday tradition that really needs to go is this collective national delusion that Christmas Vacation is a funny movie.
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This statement from North Korea yesterday: "Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest." How does a monkey go reckless in words?
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Apparently The Interview is also both "sexist" and "homophobic." Now I really want to see it.
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A tragedy of the North Korea episode is that it has crowded out news coverage of the CIA torture report.
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Fear of police apparently exists on both sides of the blue line.
posted by CM @ 11:28 AM
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