My morning reading includes far too many articles about
Trump. He appoints cabinet members and
advisors from the monied segment of American economic society (not unique, of course). His conversation is riddled with
exaggerations, and he lacks a sense of accountability for past statements or actions. His speech emboldens
those who view government as an arrogant, useless element, an impediment to
their ability to succeed. His chosen method
of primary communication -- Twitter,
with its reliance on short abbreviated text -- only highlights his inability to
handle complex issues and his lack of concrete policy beliefs aside from his
own self-interest.
I go screaming to the sports pages to find solace in
baseball news. There, the articles are about multi-year, multi-million-dollar contracts being given to men who may pitch
in 60 innings during the coming season…..Umm.
Just can’t avoid news that has ‘accumulated wealth’ at
its core.
==================================
From “Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power” by Farhad
Manjoo, NYTimes, November 16, 2016
Why is
this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has
studied the effects of social networks, suggested a few reasons.
One is
the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the
company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the
service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations
of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they
grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the
possibilities are staggering.
“When
the technology gets boring, that’s when the crazy social effects get
interesting,” Mr. Shirky said.
One of
those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the “shifting of the Overton
Window,” a term coined by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to
describe the range of subjects that the mainstream media deems publicly
acceptable to discuss.
From
about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually considered
unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of society to be out of
the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias (there were exceptions,
of course, like the Willie Horton ad). But the internet shifted that
window.
“White
ethnonationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic ignorance,” Mr. Shirky
said. “Every person who was sitting in their basement yelling at the TV about
immigrants or was willing to say white Christians were more American than other
kinds of Americans — they didn’t know how many others shared their views.”
Thanks
to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not
alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create
memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and
then break into the mainstream. The groups also become ready targets for
political figures like Mr. Trump, who recognize their energy and enthusiasm and
tap into it for real-world victories.
