A bad thing about social media is this pattern where a person with expertise starts rebutting bad ideas, and it’s great, but over time it primes them to see everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their opinions as part of a horde of goons with terrible ideas, because that’s who they end up interacting with.
Eventually their online persona is, like, Truth Gladiator. And that’s so much less interesting and important to me than Thoughtful Person With Useful Perspectives.
@vruba I think this is symptomatic of a big and perhaps related issue.
A lot of people (across all forms of social media and perhaps outside of it) define themselves by one or perhaps a couple of specific areas of interest (personal or professional or political) and then often only share “related” content.
Whether this is a specific fandom or a specific area of expertise. I see it a lot and indeed entire social media platforms reflect this in their design assumptions (algorithms etc)
@vruba this I think the builds into the kinds of one issue/one fight for truth types of personas.
I find this increasingly exhausting - I want to mostly follow and interact with people online (and offline) who have lots of different interests and hobbies and passions. Some of which may overlap with some of my own. But I actively seek out and want to mostly interact with people who will expose me to NEW and different perspectives. Entire fandoms I’m until then unaware of entirely
@Rycaut Yes. As if you went to the café or the pub and there were someone who considered themselves your friend but only ever talked about rabbits.
@vruba exactly. Even if I was, in fact, a rabbit person (say like my friend who has rabbits because - she’s a professional magician) it would get old and she would never get to talk with him about her actual passions - like magic. But not just that. (I’m not a magician and my friend though she is one never really talked about her magic when at a dinner party - no more than anyone who makes casual conversation about having work/odd experiences at work etc. but most we talked about everything else