Enjoyed the Mastodon thread. Interesting stuff, especially where they're pointing to things like "no, don't tell me I should watch something because Representation; tell me I should watch it because Good Bits", and the comments about how the whole "performative shipping" side of things is very much coming out of a US-centric version of public morality and such.
As an Australian, I certainly notice the latter, and I find it interesting that most social media sites and formats are very much built to facilitate this very ... Calvinist Protestant way of interacting with the world, where there are Good Things and Bad Things, and there are Good People who are always Good and Bad People who are always Bad, and there is One True Truth, and so on. And yeah, I was brought up in a vaguely similar public landscape and a vaguely similar public discourse, but not exactly the same, because, as mentioned, Australia is a lot less religious (and a lot more secular) than the USA. So, there's some rather interesting differences, which really only become visibly apparent when you look at our conservative politicians attempting to hammer hard on the "religious belief" cultural button (because the playbook they've borrowed from the USA says this should work in a certain way) and getting frustrated because the majority of Australians just go "yair, right, whatever", rather than getting all outraged about $THING in the way the playbook said they would.
One of the more interesting things I find online is the way individual people in the USA tend to either embrace the role of the USA as cultural hegemon (insisting there should be no difference between the ways people behave no matter where they are in the world, because the USA has the One Right Way of doing things all worked out) or there's a sort of fascination with the range of alternatives which have come out (usually while still maintaining the way it's done in one's hometown is the One True Way). But the notion of "hey, we might be doing something wrong/silly/daft/outright harmful here" doesn't seem to really slot into US thinking at all - it's like there's some kind of real cognitive gap there, where the concept "I could be wrong" slots in for most cultures.
(Again, that's Calvinist Protestant Christianity, and I can recognise it from my mother's family, who are Christadelphians who are Never Wrong. Even when they're incorrect, they're Right, because they chose to be wrong, so therefore they're Right.)
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Date: 2019-01-26 02:13 am (UTC)As an Australian, I certainly notice the latter, and I find it interesting that most social media sites and formats are very much built to facilitate this very ... Calvinist Protestant way of interacting with the world, where there are Good Things and Bad Things, and there are Good People who are always Good and Bad People who are always Bad, and there is One True Truth, and so on. And yeah, I was brought up in a vaguely similar public landscape and a vaguely similar public discourse, but not exactly the same, because, as mentioned, Australia is a lot less religious (and a lot more secular) than the USA. So, there's some rather interesting differences, which really only become visibly apparent when you look at our conservative politicians attempting to hammer hard on the "religious belief" cultural button (because the playbook they've borrowed from the USA says this should work in a certain way) and getting frustrated because the majority of Australians just go "yair, right, whatever", rather than getting all outraged about $THING in the way the playbook said they would.
One of the more interesting things I find online is the way individual people in the USA tend to either embrace the role of the USA as cultural hegemon (insisting there should be no difference between the ways people behave no matter where they are in the world, because the USA has the One Right Way of doing things all worked out) or there's a sort of fascination with the range of alternatives which have come out (usually while still maintaining the way it's done in one's hometown is the One True Way). But the notion of "hey, we might be doing something wrong/silly/daft/outright harmful here" doesn't seem to really slot into US thinking at all - it's like there's some kind of real cognitive gap there, where the concept "I could be wrong" slots in for most cultures.
(Again, that's Calvinist Protestant Christianity, and I can recognise it from my mother's family, who are Christadelphians who are Never Wrong. Even when they're incorrect, they're Right, because they chose to be wrong, so therefore they're Right.)