Lol. I love opinions like this.
Fad? Want to know what I hope is a fad? I'm going to guess that if Trad looked at 25 Linkedin profiles, three or less listed preferred pronouns. His reaction? Arguably incommensurate—more simply, triggered,
His reaction then effectively gives people the perception that this was more like at least half of the 25 had listed preferred pronouns.
If this thread continues much longer, people will claim that Linkedin is soon going to make it mandatory that all accountholders list their preferred pronouns.
I mean, look at your post. Look how this went from a thread about an old, crusty bigot being triggered by some Linkedin accounts to your assuring us that sex and gender identity won't be completely decoupled.
I mean, PHEW!!!
It's like we've become algorithms of algorithms.
Fuçking crazy.
It's like every idea has to be pushed to its extreme for people to attempt to understand it, weight it, judge its validity. But not just the idea itself—also the info behind the idea. Going back to the original premise… two or three out of 25 Linkedin profiles list pronouns… hmmm… not sure how to think about that… hmmm… well, WHAT IF THAT BECOMES 18 OUT OF 25?!! Oh, wow, NOW I know how I feel.
Going back to your CNN post… this is how our media market is training people to think. Whether TV or web page, it's not designed to deliver thoughtful information. It's designed to either keep you emotionally invested and/or make you click and scroll, click and scroll, click and scroll. How do they do that? By making every story sensational.
Well, now, we're so conditioned by this that now we do it ourselves, to ourselves.
Hoosier thinks trans people don't accept him. Because pronouns. He thinks this despite my assurance that is most assuredly not the case. He ignores that in favor of the more extreme story he's created in his head. Think about that. No questions asked, no interest expressed in my experience with my "they/them" friends/associates. Did you notice how quickly he went towards an extreme (uninformed) position on this?
Our brains are supercomputers. Powerful. But programmable, too.
Eh, while I do think the Fox styled stupid filter that so much news and information passes through these absolutely amplifies (would be) disputes and directs attention, to an extent, that's not all that's going on here. Little more dynamic.
When you've got pronouns on the box of frosted flakes, CNN, LinkedIn and half of twitter warring about these topics every day, you
can't expect somebody like Trad not to voice his opinion. This stuff has deep popular culture penetration at this point.
(and no, I don't think Trad is a right wing media monstrosity that way -- this was the sort of thing that was always going to be contentious... conservative psychology was always going to react this way... absolutely nothing new there)
I think Fox styled algorithms sit on top of all this; they sift through, find the juicy bits that get people going, and push those. I think help lead to an imbalanced poli-news diet. We know that story. To an extent, those (in this example as applied to the left) would've helped push this topic to popular culture, I suppose.
But part of this is simply so much information with so many eyes. I don't think stuff like this used to accelerate like it does now... because it couldn't. So I think it's a little more fundamental, that way.
As I mentioned before, we've got this interesting mixture of academia, activism, politics and media that really work synergistically -- not necessarily in an orchestrated way -- to get this stuff into pop-culture really quick anymore. Some of those items being moreso features of progressive politics, at any rate... the end result is high visibility on stuff like this. I think, in a more abstract sense, you've almost got that same algorithm working here too in that "interesting stuff" rises to the top quickly where it can be seen by an incredible amount of eyeballs. Now that's not a Fox exec pushing buttons, strategizing, but some of the same stuff happens effectively. And maybe it's moreso the activist sentiment -- to push and make noise -- that does the heavy lifting in the composite I mentioned above. But I think it's mostly because of the information infrastructure that now exists.
Anyway... the conversation with a guy like Trad ends up being the same boring old conservative/progressive conversation we've had a million times by now. To me the interesting bit is the
volume of these conversations. The quantity of them... the way they dominate political discourse anymore. (look at this board)
And yeah, the Fox algorithm amplifies that, for sure, but there are more fundamental forces at work, I'm increasingly convinced.
As for my post. I think Trad and I are probably off on a different planet on stuff like this besides complaining or critiquing the same thing. With threads like these I tend to interject what I find interesting, which is often sort of tangential to the OP's point. If that close.
My responses, often enough, are rather terse and a bit vague (often because I just don't have the time) and also a bit provocative. (I mix it up like a lot of people here, taking on adversarial positions and poking at certain crowds -- this leads to a lack preface in commentary... I sort of allow people to assume the worse but don't actually give it to them... which is sort of a dick thing to do, but... HROT)
With this topic my real fascination is the phenomenology behind it.
When I said "fad" I was literally talking about:
1) The level of interest in pronouns. It's a hot topic, I don't think it's that durable. It's just not that meaningful, ultimately. It's what somebody is asking you to call them. Again... your asking someone else to refer to you a certain way. There's the obviously useful lesson to be learned (if you didn't know) that people might not internally identify with what their physical appearance would imply sex wise, and I think most people will get that. And you should probably not be a dick and call them by their preferred pronoun. (which we people will probably continue to fight about)
But I don't think this will have durability as some sort of bit of information everybody feels required to convey when, say, introducing themselves. You're seeing that now in certain more progressive leaning circles... be it a business or a college or whatever. But I don't think it lasts. (Kind of like LatinX) Mostly because there is a tiny minority that *legitimately* feels the need to use it. Legitimately because...
2) There's a bunch of people like Demi Lovato playing the pronoun game. To put it bluntly, she probably wasn't "born that way" and neither were they. The people that really seem into this stuff -- besides the "born that way" crowd -- are progressive women with emotional instability. (really look at the people that get into this stuff -- it's dominated by a certain sort of woman) I think there are a lot of "a problem looking for a solution" situations here.
www.theatlantic.com
