Although it contains a lot of particular details, this vignette can be taken as representative of something that is common on social media: people’s tendency there to do anything possible, in the conversations that they hold, to avoid conceding the tiniest sliver of ground. People don't want the truth, they want their own ideas given back to them. I’ve written before about people’s tendency to treat politics as a kind of football game: they support political parties in the same way that they would support a football team (use your preferred form of football, in Australia we play four different kinds). That is, with passion and unthinkingly.
But it’s the case with any event that engages people’s attention. If you grab someone by the collar or by the button and talk to their faces, they will talk back. And they will tell you that you are wrong. If you disagree in public about someone they are used to agreeing with, they will take this very personally. They will, in fact, take it as a challenge. “Hey,” they will think, “this guy Matthew is dissing my guy Eric, I have to stop this!” So to help Eric they will do whatever it takes to discredit Matthew, starting with the arguments he puts forward.
To show how this happens, let me describe a conversation I had with a US journalist, who is the deputy editor of a reputable news outlet. He is based in New York City and I saw his first tweet at 10.40am on 3 September, Sydney time. I’ll use his first name for convenience. Eric said that his niece, who is 14, had written a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times to complain about an op-ed that had been published in the paper that had remarked on the fact that teenagers don’t read serious books anymore. She said, in reply, that, while literature (specifically, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’) had changed her life, so, too, had the fantasy podcast ‘Rabbits’, the ‘Harry Potter’ books, and the video game ‘Minecraft’.
In reply to Eric, I said that studies had shown that reading literary fiction helps to improve empathy in the reader, while other forms of culture, such as genre fiction, movies, and video games, do not. “I call bullshit on said studies,” said Eric. I replied that he was being a bit unreasonable, like a climate-change denier discrediting the work of scientists that shows that global warming is caused by humans. He said that he meant for me to show him the studies. I hadn’t gotten this particular Americanism – “call bullshit on” something is apparently a common turn of phrase there – and then told him to google it.
In response some of his followers had a look for the studies. And while Eric never responded again to me, I got a long series of comments from people on Eric’s side who questioned what I had said. In order to discredit the whole, they took apart what I said and debunked bits of it. There was only one study, went one guy. The study didn’t take into account video games, it only compared reading literary fiction with reading other types of book, such as nonfiction and popular fiction. One person said that, in her view, “There are *many* movies that increase human empathy.” Other people were less kind. One said, “produce the evidence or shut up,” even though others had substantiated what I had initially said.
Others were supportive of what I had said and one person even put up a blogpost about a study that had been done on the phenomenon in question. One Melbourne writer said, accurately as it turns out, “yeah the studies don't confine it to literary fiction, fwiw. found the same thing with Stephen King as they did with Proust. a large part has to do with the level of engagement of the individual with the art, not the art itself.”
The thing is that I had known about the benefits of reading literary fiction for over a year and it rankled with the people who objected to my statement that they had been caught out sitting in ignorance. It was shame that made them all so defensive. So they backed their guy to the hilt, and damn the facts. This is the way Twitter works, I have found. This example was just so neat that I felt compelled to describe what happened in detail.
Strangely, just as I had finished editing this post a guy I follow from the US put up a retweet that contained a quote. It went, “’If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse.’ - Jim Rohn.”
But it’s the case with any event that engages people’s attention. If you grab someone by the collar or by the button and talk to their faces, they will talk back. And they will tell you that you are wrong. If you disagree in public about someone they are used to agreeing with, they will take this very personally. They will, in fact, take it as a challenge. “Hey,” they will think, “this guy Matthew is dissing my guy Eric, I have to stop this!” So to help Eric they will do whatever it takes to discredit Matthew, starting with the arguments he puts forward.
To show how this happens, let me describe a conversation I had with a US journalist, who is the deputy editor of a reputable news outlet. He is based in New York City and I saw his first tweet at 10.40am on 3 September, Sydney time. I’ll use his first name for convenience. Eric said that his niece, who is 14, had written a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times to complain about an op-ed that had been published in the paper that had remarked on the fact that teenagers don’t read serious books anymore. She said, in reply, that, while literature (specifically, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’) had changed her life, so, too, had the fantasy podcast ‘Rabbits’, the ‘Harry Potter’ books, and the video game ‘Minecraft’.
In reply to Eric, I said that studies had shown that reading literary fiction helps to improve empathy in the reader, while other forms of culture, such as genre fiction, movies, and video games, do not. “I call bullshit on said studies,” said Eric. I replied that he was being a bit unreasonable, like a climate-change denier discrediting the work of scientists that shows that global warming is caused by humans. He said that he meant for me to show him the studies. I hadn’t gotten this particular Americanism – “call bullshit on” something is apparently a common turn of phrase there – and then told him to google it.
In response some of his followers had a look for the studies. And while Eric never responded again to me, I got a long series of comments from people on Eric’s side who questioned what I had said. In order to discredit the whole, they took apart what I said and debunked bits of it. There was only one study, went one guy. The study didn’t take into account video games, it only compared reading literary fiction with reading other types of book, such as nonfiction and popular fiction. One person said that, in her view, “There are *many* movies that increase human empathy.” Other people were less kind. One said, “produce the evidence or shut up,” even though others had substantiated what I had initially said.
Others were supportive of what I had said and one person even put up a blogpost about a study that had been done on the phenomenon in question. One Melbourne writer said, accurately as it turns out, “yeah the studies don't confine it to literary fiction, fwiw. found the same thing with Stephen King as they did with Proust. a large part has to do with the level of engagement of the individual with the art, not the art itself.”
The thing is that I had known about the benefits of reading literary fiction for over a year and it rankled with the people who objected to my statement that they had been caught out sitting in ignorance. It was shame that made them all so defensive. So they backed their guy to the hilt, and damn the facts. This is the way Twitter works, I have found. This example was just so neat that I felt compelled to describe what happened in detail.
Strangely, just as I had finished editing this post a guy I follow from the US put up a retweet that contained a quote. It went, “’If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse.’ - Jim Rohn.”
No comments:
Post a Comment