These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes.
But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical jokes on most sitcoms. Some of our grandmothers could not vote. Swimming pools and schools - schools! - were racially segregated within a lifetime.
Contrary to your post, we have been gradually escaping from the extreme crazy bad ideas. Let's keep it up.
In a time when people didn't question their gender, many of them might have felt themselves to be alone in their feelings. They not only learned to suppress their feelings (to avoid ridicule or worse), they were unable to understand them because literature was oppressed. Much self-isolation, even tragedy ensued. In many "less civilized cultures" these differences were not an excuse for abuse, but were recognized, even exalted ... until the colonizers came along with their 'truths'.
Exploring, understanding and accepting ourselves is an important step, for -all- of us, not just the typicals. "To thine own self be true..."
Edit: Never stop making things better in terms of equality, but perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate cancel culture or people getting internet points for gender confusion.
Think about it. Everyone is now consuming the same Tiktok, reddit, Netflix, music, video games globally. Twitter isn't some hidden cove only westerners have access to. The world is following along as George Floyd is brutally murdered in the street. Have you seen Parasite or Squid Game? They deal directly with topics like class struggle / racism and they resonated with people all over the earth. The fact that South Korean media is even producing media such as these would've been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Annual gay parade have started take place in Seoul since 2015, and interracial marriage numbers have never been higher.
I'm sure there are outlier nations who have faced regression in their cultural maturity since, but they're anything but the representative sample and claiming otherwise would be disingenuous. So no, this isn't something cooked up by the bored progressives of the U.S. This is not some obscure domain reserved for the western elites. This is where the world is headed towards - the westerners simply got there before the rest of us.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/06/04/the-global-div...
So, despite setbacks, maybe there has been real progress in what is now the worlds largest democracy.
There are many problems in contemporary India but I would suggest you not generalize the average Indian in this way. Many young people are quite open minded and quite westernized in their attitudes towards social issues. Modi’s victories in Parliament are complicated and not all driven by religious intolerance.
People are afraid to set boundaries for fear of getting cancel cultured or harassed by a woke tolerance mob. All disagreement is now "toxic behavior" on social media channels. Arguing over perspectives is now sometimes branded with the extreme label of gaslighting. Day by day our Overton window continues to shift, and yet we were all told the slippery slope was supposedly a fallacy.
Please take the above as a meta joke. I shouldn't have have to say it, but this is the world we live in.
Still, it's impossible to deny the negative impact it has on people who can't handle the vastness of opinion, and many of them turn to the comforting simplicity of reactionary extremism to cope.
Not to be too Orwellian, but I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance. People seem to only talk about adding new words and concepts.
'They' instead of 'he/she' is one of the things people actually use, and it's exactly dropping the gendered pronoun in favor of an existing neutral pronoun. It's strictly simpler and smaller language. My teenage kids use this construction a lot and I'm getting used to it.
1) Gender is currently a political topic. The use of gender neutral pronouns is, rightly or wrongly, associated with holding certain political beliefs. People who do not hold these beliefs are likely to reject their use on that basis.
2) Gender is a matter of personal identity. A fairly common desire for people is to be "good" at the gender they identify as. A fundamental part of that is being recognised by others as that gender. Gender neutral pronouns refuse to provide that acknowledgement.
3) They can be unfamiliar. Ultimately pronouns are something that, until recently, most people never actively thought about. Some people will reactively reject them as it puts into question their understanding of the world.
That said, I think your Orwellian concerns might reflect your personal media consumption more than the state of our changing world. People do talk about removing gendered pronouns (see: nonbinary people), and the vast majority of transgender people are attempting to assimilate into the existing man/woman gender model rather than pushing a complex system of new words and concepts. As I'm sure you're aware, both of those approaches have proven controversial and generated quite a bit of backlash, sometimes violently so.
Not everyone is cut out for a world filled with people who don't think like them. Unfortunately that's the world we live in, so we all get to figure out what to do about it.
the singular they, 'my friend', y'all, fam etc... are all wonderful substitutes for a gendered pronoun.
That sounds like a liberal feminist from ~20 years ago, trying to remove words that they think are used to oppress people. Like the people who invented Latinx.
What has changed is just that extremist groups have very successfully adopted the communication tools available to them for recruitment and engagement.
Completely agree on your second point though, the amplifying power of the internet aids all messages (without intervention, anyway).
It has been objectively documented that anxiety has increased over the years, and I (And every other Tom, Dick and Harry) have subjective just-so-stories and complaints that will blame particular attributes of modern society on why more people are looking for these kinds of answers today than they were before.
Those with weaker "immune systems" succumb to the mental viruses and cause themselves possibly irreparable harm by either joining a radical cult of their choosing or falling into some medical pathology rabbit hole.
Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?
Okay.
> You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input.
Reductionist, but I follow. What is insanity, and who defines it? Prior to the modern day, homosexuality was insanity or illness.
> Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points.
Outside of some very extreme circles, nobody is actually doing this seriously. Where are you even seeing this?
> Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you.
No, they just kept quiet about it. That’s the difference, and it seems many are not ready to face the complex nature of psyche.
> Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity.
Most people are reasonable enough to understand celebrating obesity and “health at every size” is a fringe, unscientific and extremist idea.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex.
Once again, extreme communities. Not sure if you refer to incels, would love some clarification.
> Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Hate and extremism was invented by the internet?
> The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
I see nothing new here. It’s more accesible, yes, but public shame and gossip (!!!) has happened for millennia.
People can organize better and agendas can be pushed easily via the internet. But these voices are fringe and minority. Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding.
Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
It's not reasonably possible to rid ourselves of the internet, and in fact I think it's a net Good. The issue going forward is to consider and teach responsible internet use for not just young people, but everyone. Most of the shitty, intentionally hurtful things I see on the internet don't come from young folks, but from adults trying to inflict harm. People like that have always existed, and are the real problem in these cases.
I think OP is expressing concern that maybe young people aren't living there as much as you'd hope.
Most of these issues, and the extent to which they are issues, are in the eye of the beholder.
> Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
Does being terminally online contribute more or less to this? I'm still not sure, but leaning towards more. People always parroted others, but now with social reach being so concentrated, it seems like everyone parrots from a smaller pool. The consequence/reward for expression are much more well defined in the online world as well.
You don’t have to browse Reddit for long to to see plenty of self-described loners, people dealing with anxiety and other mental issues. And it makes sense that these people would find community online.
But if kids are going online and being bombarded with “the world is doomed”, and “what I thought were just the challenges of growing up are actually a mental illness” or “once I did [unhealthy coping mechanism], I felt like my problems were solved”, they developed unhealthy and distorted views of how kids their age think and act. I can see it being very easy to get sucked into the worst kind of community.
And if kids isolate themselves further the online world is literally 99% of their entire world view. And what an awful distorted world that is.
>The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Back in the pre-internet days, the "village idiot" was "canceled". No one bothered to listen to his idiotic blatherings or attempting to debate or debunk him; everyone just ignored him because he was a waste of time. Hence, he was "canceled", or "isolated" as you put it. But now you're complaining about similarly stupid and dangerous people being "canceled" (i.e., ignored and shunned).
For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
86.
A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.
> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?
The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"
Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos
What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.
Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.
Jan Zimmerman.
You can see the search for yourself here, https://www.google.com/search?q=Jan+Zimmerman+internet+viral...
We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.
If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,
First the background rate,
> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls
Then the "surge"
> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.
4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.
And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.
This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.
The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,
> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.
https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420
No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.
So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.
96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.
This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.
You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.
Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.
Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.
All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.
In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.
What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.
I know there's a panic over "screen time", which I've never really been on board with.
But I think there's a lot more to be said for keeping children away from the internet. The screen isn't so much of a problem. But the internet is.
If federal, state and local legislation or exclusive constitutional rights qualify as normalization, then we've been here before in the US... on several occasions.
> The sheer volume of it.
%100 agree. The difference between now and all the other times is that it's hard to escape it if you want to function in society-at-large. But I'd add that an obsession with growth is also key to the deleterious effects of social media.
"Good afternoon, do you have a moment for me to talk to you about our lord Jesus Christ?"
Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.