Make Up Your Minds Already!

I’ve been getting sucked back into social media arguments recently. 

Well, one specific argument that came up in a specific Facebook group I’m in. (Overgeneralization is, ironically, part of the subject of the argument.)

To say that I “try” to avoid doing this is an understatement. I spent some indeterminate amount of time in my twenties thinking that Facebook arguments could make the world a better place, like countless others, and we all know how that turned out. It took a lot of processing, therapy, and working on boundaries to shift my patterns around social media use. These days I mostly avoid anything contentious on social media. I’d rather have in person conversations with people I have some rapport with - or at least am looking at face-to-face - about issues that matter. 

But contention can sneak in anywhere, even while avoiding overtly political online spaces. I don’t even want to get into the topic of the post because it would be a distraction. What has really been bothering me for a while now in online spaces is when I see someone commenting and they are talking about a large number of people as if they are all one person. As if an entire group, or an entire gender, is supposed to be a hive mind with one opinion and philosophy. 

Examples:

“You all say women want consent and to talk about what they want sexually, but then when I do that women tell me I’m not [dominant/assertive] enough. Make up your minds* already!”

“Everyone’s jumping on OP for trying to rescue this animal and interfering with nature, but last week you all got mad when someone didn’t do enough to help that other animal! Make up your mind already!”

(*The word processing system I used to write this told me that this should be “mind,” which I find enriching, because even a computer program recognizes that a mind is unique to an individual and made up individually, I guess? I’m actually unsure if the commenters I’m thinking of used singular mind or plural minds - probably some of both, since there are so many comments like this.)

I want to disclose that I’m not really in an empathetic mental/emotional state about this. Intellectually, I can sort of empathize with people feeling confused and wanting clarity of expectations (from who - expectations from society? Their perceived peer group?). Consistency is also a need. I know these needs. I have these needs. At times I have been greatly distressed and lashed out when these needs were not met, which may be what’s going on for some of these social media users.

But my ability to empathize is limited by just how pissed and fed up I am with the apparent expectation that Facebook groups or subreddits with tens of thousands of members should all have the same opinion on something! Or worse, that all women would have the same opinions and desires about sex! It’s ridiculous! It’s absurd! It’s flattening, and embarrassing for the people making these comments!

(These are my judgments. I’m ‘enjoying my jackal show,’ to use Marshall Rosenberg’s phrase. Also known as allowing myself to vent.)

I shared these frustrations with my partner and they mentioned that people also do this about political camps - as if everyone on the left and the right should have the exact same analysis, views, and policy preferences as everyone else, and if they don’t their whole “side” is contradictory. Isn’t the whole point of a political spectrum that, you know, it’s a spectrum? And people fall on different places along it? Or better yet, along various axes of political orientation? (Turns out there’s a lot more learning I could do about this, which I discovered when looking for something to hyperlink to here.)

It’s understandable that people do this flattening when engaging in online spaces. Words appear on a screen without much context, or any accents or body language. Why bother paying attention to individual names, even? The strangers on the internet all blur into one masse of people that we mentally divide into as few groups as possible by supposed dog whistles (which exist in our own minds as much or more than the people using them), instead of the complex, fragile mammals that they are. 

I even noticed myself doing it when responding to these trends. I was treating all the commenters in the argument mentioned at the beginning of this post as if they were the same, part of a horde of online zombies determined to flatten online conversations. My cumulative distress about this phenomenon suddenly came bursting out at them in a series of antagonistic comments with clever, unique phrases like, “Stop treating all the group members as part of a hive mind. The group is made up of individuals with diverse opinions. It’s not that hard of a concept.” I’m sure their approach to online dialogue is forever changed by my commanding tone and creative ridicule  </s>**. (**This means “end sarcasm.”)

The problems of text-based communication, especially with strangers, have been discussed ad nauseum for the past decade plus. I fear it will come off as trite to recommend we re-engage in in-person discussions of topics that matter to us, but that’s the best I’ve got today. This recent flair up of a Facebook argument I found myself in is a reminder to ground myself in non-digital reality as much as possible, especially when it comes to discussing contentious topics. 

I’m not saying we should never engage with such topics online - in fact, something specifically related to that was going to be a part of this post, but I am thinking it will work best as a separate piece. I’d love to improve my communication with people about hard issues online, and have found some limited success. But it is hard work that involves a lot of compensation for the limitations of the medium (eg negativity bias). I don’t know that it offers the best EROI (energy returned on energy invested) to get the results I want in terms of change in my community/society/the world.