the public square

[rising_moon]

Recently, prompted by some of the public comments about the Notre-Dame fire, dreda's and my mutual friend Gwendolyn posted a thoughtful caution about public discourse in social media.

https://occultlibrarian.blogspot.com/2019/04/social-media-and-public-square.html?fbclid=IwAR3T_SsfZHYq7WkPnZL2_2Itgwphcpe2ygkZdpuQcuob8Jhw-KiovHMwOH4

Essentially:

1. People are not understanding that they have no real privacy rights in this sphere. What they say is not private. It also doesn't ever really go away, even if they delete it.

2. You are being monetized. Your conflict and drama is being monetized and machines are learning from it. ... It isn't private and the way it is used is opaque and doesn't require your consent.

3. In pretending like we are in a private space but not realizing that we are in a public square what we have really done is to collectively lose cultural competency about how to have public conversation.

Gwendolyn neatly summarized my main concerns about FB, G+, and any conversation accessible to a monetizable search engine.

Comments

[crosslet]

There's a lot of really insightful writing in Gwendolyn's post beyond the public vs private space conversation. I'm glad I clicked on the link.

This particular quote:
"standing up and saying to those who are grieving..."I see your pain. I care about the fact you are in pain. "

This is a strong reminder to me - not only in writing but life in general.

[siderea]

Okay, so, the blog post you point to: it references a controversy of which I hadn't previously been aware, but nevertheless managed to provoke an extremely negative reaction in me and convince me I should be on the other side of a conflict I hadn't even known existed.

Your friend takes a stance of niceness, but what she writes is neither kind nor compassionate. If her most generous interpretation, "the most charitable read that I could", was "the person was genuinely wanting to try to protect indigenous sacred lands and that they have an actual activist/reform motivation rather than a troll motivation"... It makes me want to drag her for her racism and colonialism, and I don't do call out culture.

Your friend describes the meaning to Parisians of Notre Dame as "something that I can't fully fathom", but does not grant the same acknowledgment of her limitations to why someone might say something like that. She doesn't extend that same courtesy of noting, "this is beyond my knowledge", to the brown side. She assumes she can assume.

The really, really obvious reason someone might have said the thing she objects to, the thing she goes five sides about the square to say shouldn't have been said, is because they are suffering. Because watching the mass media, and not just the mass media, but the great mass of ordinary white people, lionize as a priceless cultural heritage the crown jewel of an institution that made itself your people's enemy and was instrumental in their subjugation, is, to say the least, a really uncomfortable experience.

The only analogy that comes to mind that might clarify this for the unwitting is being forced to go to your batterer's funeral, and being expected to sit decorously silently while he's praised to high heaven and people bewail his loss. Of course, one generally has the choice of not going to the funeral of people one doesn't regret the death of, and can't stand to hear aggrandized. But this, this is omnipresent. One can't escape it. Your friend would have the whole world be that funeral, wispering fiercely Shush! Don't speak ill of the dead! There are grieving people here! to those unwillingly trapped in it. But the sauce she serves for the gander is good for the goose, too: if all spaces are public, then she doesn't get to demand they all are on funeral-behavior.

For people for whom Notre Dame is a symbol of something very painful, the present moment is somewhere from difficult to excruciating. And those people? Also get to exist in this world. They get to say things about how it's hard and painful to watch this unfold. They get to complain about the unfairness of it, and the sadness of it. Nobody gets to tell them their pain comes second. Nobody gets to tell them they don't get to be in public with their undecorous hurt, and that they should shut up and go away because the real people are mourning a valid grief.