I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and a writing fellow at the New Economic School in Moscow. I'm interested in writing pedagogy, particularly the ways in which writing and writing instruction can restructure perception. My dissertation explores this topic through the work of philosopher William James.
For many of us, the above video is disturbing. I think it’s important though, in that it represents a distillation of the very issues this panel seeks to address. In short, it depicts life among the fragments.
For more than two decades now, scholars have noted the increasingly polarized nature of American society. It seems different groups inhabit different realities, informed by different sources of information, beholden to different idols. This division is most apparent in the realm of politics, of course, where according to a recent Pew survey, the divisions between Republicans and Democrats on race, immigration, national security, environmental protection and the role of government are deeper than ever. And the nation’s fault lines are not just political, as I’m sure we all know. Where we live, where we shop, what we enjoy— New York City vs. Augusta, Kansas (my hometown), Wholefoods vs. Walmart, Hamilton vs. Duck Dynasty—in every regard, Americans are more separated, more segregated culturally and cognitively than at any point in modern times.
What’s behind this polarization? Some scholars have tied it to the decline of institutions. Previously, overarching structures like church, family and the welfare state regulated subjectivity, enforced normativity. With postmodernism and neoliberalism, they argue, these institutions have collapsed. “The individuation of social experience and the decline of broad social memberships,” Lance Bennett and Jarol Manheim write, is the defining feature of our age (221). Individuals must now take “responsibility for managing their own emotional and cognitive realities” (221). The result is a proliferation of realities.
Digital media technology aids this proliferation. As Cass Sunstein notes, where once we had to rely on “general interest intermediaries”—daily broadsheets and nightly newscasts—for information about the world, we can now tailor our own information streams. We can watch Fox News or MSNBC, and hear only of, say, Donald Trump’s successes or failures, depending on our preference. Online, as Eli Parser argues, the situation is even more extreme. Personalization algorithms—on Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and Google—provide “invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas” (13). They feed us more of the same, trapping us with within “filter bubbles” and “you-loops.”
Sunstein has long warned of the dangers of media customization. Cast as consumers, we act as consumers, embracing that which is familiar, avoiding difficult ideas and alternate perspectives. In turn, our beliefs grow extreme, our ideologies strident. Democratic politics thus becomes impossible.
We can now perhaps see the above video through a wider-angle lens. Like all of us, these students have been tasked with constructing their own realities. And their constructions are in open conflict. Taking each student at their word, we see that for one, the MAGA hat represents genocide, while for the other, it represents an act of conscience. Not only are their interpretations different though, but they seem to lack even a basis of shared values on which to build. “Fuck your law,” says the women. “No, fuck your law,” the man might as well respond.
What replaces conversation or debate? An act of physical revolt, and tellingly, a resort to institutional authority. We live in an age of carefully curated information streams, remember. In such a world, when exposed to information I don’t like—which doesn’t fit my preference as a consumer—I click “unfollow” or “block.” This is what the woman, in essence, seeks to do here. And note now quickly the man—a conservative activist, as it turns out—moves to record the encounter. He is likely thinking in terms of production, of ways to leverage the event to shape his (online) identity, promote his personal brand.
In short, my claim is that this video represents political, economic and technological forces playing out their hand. The question becomes, as teachers of English, how do we respond?
Works Cited
Bennett, Lance & Manheim, Jarol. “The One-Step Flow of Communication” The Annals of the AAPSS. 608 (Nov. 2006).
Parser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. New York: Penguin Press (2011).
Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, NJ: The Princeton University Press (2007).
Please check out my blog at mwover.com
Or my response to Casey Boyle's "Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice" in College English 80.1 (paywall)