Culture Warriors category archive
The Decline and Falwell 0
Dana Hall McCain finds it hard to wrap her head around the news out of Liberty University.
Facebook Frolics 0
I am beginning to think that there is nothing more routinely an pettily anti-social than “social” media.
Barefoot and in the Kitchen 0
Thom looks at the misogyny that underlies the anti-abortion crew.
It’s All about the Algorithm, “Googling Is Believing” Dept. 0
David and his guest discuss how the internet feeds confirmation bias.
Republican Family Values 0
The Des Moines Register’s Rekha Basu comments on Congressman Steve King’s (R-Cloud Cuckoo Land) defense of rape and incest. A snippet:
Follow the link and read the rest.
The Bully’s Pulpits 0
Martin Longman tries to figure out why white, evangelical “Christians” are so enamored with Donald Trump. An excerpt:
His Fleeting Moment of Defame 0
Judge kicks the Little Smirk’s defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post to the curb because there was no there there.
Trapped in a Cell (Phone) 0
Glen Geher explores the dark side of living in a screen-based world. A snippet:
Intuitively, we can understand why. Someone who is posting anonymously to a blog probably will never meet the blogger in person. They probably have little investment in the blogger’s personal success. Further, unless the blogger is some kind of super computer hacker, the anonymous commenter is probably never going to “get caught.” So the possibility of retribution is unlikely.
Of course, evolved human conditions were not like this at all. However, the “anonymous blog comment” is, as we all know, just the tip of the iceberg. These days, people are regularly, across a broad array of platforms, communicating with others in anonymous, deindividuated* ways. This is a highly mismatched, unnatural way for humans to communicate with one another, and for a variety of reasons, it brings out the worst in us.
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*From Britannica.com (more at the link): “Deindividuation, phenomenon in which people engage in seemingly impulsive, deviant, and sometimes violent acts in situations in which they believe they cannot be personally identified (e.g., in groups and crowds and on the Internet).”