Not my fault for wearing my favorite red shirt.
I was reminded of this during punching discourse (where multiple different perspectives would say “but I see nothing but X”) and reading this post about pretending you don’t know who Zizek is.
As one commenter said “What bars do people go to where Zizek is a conversation starter? This will never happen to me.”
(Someone reading my posts asked if Zizek actually was a dude people knew, or just some obscure figure I and I alone talk about.)
I’ve said before I don’t worry about the “bubble” as a filter preventing us from hearing the facts of the “other side.”
But I do worry about this Hall of Mirrors effect. With the power of social media, we can choose to follow a lot of people who have said things we find witty, insightful, and reasonable. It’s a big world and there are many such people, enough that you can weed out people with fairly different opinions, and still have a lot of content to consume.
But our mind doesn’t stop and check “okay, you’re only sampling from the people around you,” quite as much as it should. One effect of that is presuming victory on your side, that everyone must agree with you, but in political tactics battles we at least think to balance that with pessimism, and some (quasi)objective standards. Ie, have you seen what the polls say?
Where this becomes a real problem is the complaint of overhyping. Omg everyone is talking about Zizek and looks down on people who want to punch Nazis! Zizek must be so overrated, and maybe my political side is a hivemind.
And then you check with a friend outside your little hall of mirrors bubble, and they say “funny, I don’t see any red at all.”
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