#45

It’s a binary - but what marckee’s saying is correct in that an individual today has more a) access to wider range of information and b) control over what information they digest than ever before. People can choose not to exercise their freedoms with regards to this, but that’s their choice.

^This makes my point for me. I follow plenty of Leave supporters. You didn’t use the platform to seek out alternative voices on the matter. Which, again, is your choice. Which/whose opinions you consume on twitter is almost entirely at your own discretion. You have a platform which you can use to liberate yourself from the negative forces you describe, and you’re choosing not to use it.

#46

should probaly point out that this is the fashion industry as a whole per year as opposed just cotton (as it reads)

H&M btw prides itself on being ‘the most sustainable fashion retailer’ and yet …due to its size is also directly one of the largest pollutants. At a recent conference the TV was at they were waxing lyrical about having reduced the carbon footprint of their production by 15% per garment and later they talked about it in the context of how that had allowed them to increase output by 15% without increasing their carbon footprint

so, ‘we’re taking a massive pollutant shit on the environment every day but we’ve figured out how to take exactly the same size shit on the environment everyday but with in increased efficiency because we care and we are the best’ :thinking:

Great big capitalist gold star to H&M & every one can go home feeling pleased about themself yeah?

#47

I mean qualitatively here obv

#48

I agree - the danger though is that I didn’t know this. I thought that represented the majority opinion - there were a few Leave supporters but they were in the minority (or so I thought).

It’s not an active decision to remain in the bubble - it’s that it’s easy to get caught up in one unintentionally without really knowing it. I like to think I’m open-minded and critical and even I get sucked into it.

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#50

I think what I’m trying to say is that the system is set-up to trap you in that echo chamber. (If you follow x, you may want to follow y…)

#51

Actually really pleased I started the thread, it’s #mademethink

@marckee Great points about how you can be ‘passively’ activist, hadn’t considered that but it’s incredibly important. Regarding how easy it is to be informed - @anon30627475 covered this well but I’d add that even if you are interested in current affairs, in this fast paced world that’s full of information, it can be hard to keep up. If something newsworthy happens when I’m working, I increasingly find it difficult to understand what’s happened from social media, and the subject hasn’t always been covered sufficiently on news websites for me to know what’s going on.

On a personal level, echo chambers are less of an issue for me than the opposite, which is feeling drowned in different perspectives and struggling to grasp what I do and don’t believe in the world. Personally I would never be able to totally disengage from the news, but a) I think I could engage more effectively (I don’t think that engaging in arguments/minute details about Brexit or Trump are useful for me, and think I could be more helpful in learning about and promoting stuff about the environment?) and b) I struggle hugely to really understand and consequently be interested in, huge ideological structures like socialism and capitalism, so probably need to find ways to engage with stuff like poverty (for example) practically rather than intellectually. If that makes sense.

(Actually the 2 main people I know who have recently adopted this strategy are almost caricatures of the two ‘types’ of people who do this: the person who struggles tremendously with MH, and the person who feels uncomfortable with inequalities and therefore finds it easier to switch off than to do anything.)

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#52

Undeniably. But the fact remains you still have complete control over who you follow and what you read on there. Maybe the argument is that you need to be ‘informed’ (I don’t like using that word in this context) before you use twitter in particular as a content aggregator! But then again I actively seek out and follow people I completely disagree with and despise. I still follow James Delingpole ffs.

#53

Besides all that, I think those numbers are too abstract for most people. I mean what does 600bn tonnes of waste look like? How do we change our fabric buying decisions in a meaningful way? This is where fair trade got things right; it made it easy to tell which products fitted the scheme and it showed in relatable terms how it helped producers. Big numbers don’t do any of this.

#54

Fairly sure I’m gonna give up all social media this year. It’s just too much of everything. News, feelings of inadequacy, anger, stupidity, rare nice/happy/funny moments.

Bf is currently doing this and hasn’t been on twitter or Instagram or news for 2 months. He’s loving it.

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#55

Hmmm, I sort of see being informed about the facts as something that’s useful to bring up in conversation because I increasingly it’s seemed really key to avoiding misinformation whether that’s from what feels like increasingly partisan media.

I do definitely feel like there’s a sort of, almost liberal melancholia spurred by recent events, where rather than working on solutions the dialogue from more liberal sources seems to be fixated on endlessly pointing out how terrible the slide towards right-wing ideology is without proposing an alternative.

I’d imagine, particularly if that’s your main intake of media is from these sources, probably the most depressing thing to read and I wouldn’t blame anyone from wanting to switch off.

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#56

To expect everyone to do that is unrealistic though. There’s interesting research on the psychology of belief and facts - people search out material that confirms their own beliefs rather than material which contradicts. That’s why I think this polarisation of beliefs in the media and online has happened.

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#57

I think popular media in general (particularly the BBC and established left and right wing media, is there even a centre ground anymore?) is incredibly tiresome, prejudiced, clickbaity, voyeuristic and speculative in place of being balanced, informative and broad in content.

Brexit is a first world problem at the end of the day and much of the news that we should be concerned about internationally is not that widely reported now with focus instead on schadenfreude, gruesome crimes or political infighting. The Independent as a print newspaper was dull, but at least it made some attempt at balanced news reporting. The Guardian just feels like a left wing platform for champagne socialists and I despise myself when I buy it.

On top of that it is very difficult to trust internet news. Where do people go for reliable news these days?

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#59

Left wing relative to the Mail or something maybe. It’s mainly a Zone 2 liberal capitalist perspective tbh.

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#60

Yeah exactly, this was part of what I was trying to get at in our little argument last night - awareness of the enormous scale or the critical state of things is rarely a good motivator of behavior change, often quite the opposite, making individuals feel totally powerless or discouraged or even overwhelmed, disconnected etc

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#61

I would read the hell out of that
Online anywhere?

#63

I doubt your thesis was terrible but PM away :slight_smile:

#65

Does anyone else not feel the burden of being informed in the following way: (oh god this is gonna sound so superior but fuck it)

I’m part of or on the fringes of a group conversation which turns to some current issue in politics or ethics and people start trotting my out all the well tested bits of the debate, and I just feel paralysed to say anything cos it feels like there’s such a mountain to climb to get them to the point where there’s any true understanding of the thing? Fucking hell thats clunky, here’s an eg:

Was talking to some people about gendered toys and clothes for kids, and one person was like “well they are born with a gender and there’s nothing you can do about it” and I just felt like I couldn’t be arsed going from the very beginning of how genetics probably has only an extremely small part in it and how gender is an intricate act we all learn from a very young age but that the act is fluid and determined by the values and prejudices of the particular society and … nah fuck it I’ll just “hmm” and shrug and say something about my son quite liking his pink socks.

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#66

Yes. Usually when speaking to my dad.

#67

on the subject of avoiding social media bubbles, the problem for me is that everything is so polarised

i pretty much only use facebook and i follow some very left wing stuff (corbyn, green party) and in past have followed some pretty right wing stuff (the spectator) and i follow the economist who are definitely to the right economically but very socially liberal

on any public page people seem to be really far towards either yes to brexit/fuck off snowflakes etc. or very firmly towards corbyn/pro gay marriage etc.

and then you get people commenting on the fucking economist going “you’ve turned in the e-communist lol” and it’s like HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU THINK THE ECONOMIST IS A COMMUNIST PUBLICATION

and then anywhere that’s fairly in the centre of those two opposing views is still quite far to the right of what the actual political centre really is - i would consider corbyn to be pretty central in that he wants natural monopolies to be nationalised but not everything, and he wants small and medium businesses to thrive and make a profit - he’s not anti business he just thinks that businesses shouldn’t have all the power. a fairly even balance of free markets and the state

anyway, in terms of being uninformed, since september when i started my new job i’ve been pretty much constantly in a good mood, my world is pretty great (very lucky, me). therefore i can take a look at the news, quickly stop reading it and walk to the pub, i feel ok.

but when i properly read the news and some long form pieces i get sucked into thinking about it deeply, i get terrible existential dread - the environment, the surveillance state, brexit etc. it’s all so fucked and sure, i can do some things for each of them, stop eating meat, go on protests, go to meetings, whatever

but do i think that there’s literally anything i can do that could possibly stop everything going incredibly wrong? no not in fucking slightest

can totally understand why people switch off, yes it’s a position of privilege but so are shitloads of things for many people i know (i know plenty of people earning good money/with mortages/living in london like i do/happy in their job like me/etc. etc.) so i can understand why they don’t notice. what i’m trying to say is that very few people really understand ALL the ways in which they’re privileged so it’s hardly a surprise that people disengage form the news without thinking about the fact that they’re lucky to be able to do so

rambling, should probably sleep

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#68

When I was about five or six years old it became apparent that my state of mind was being affected by TV news. Ethiopian famine, AIDs, ferry disasters, iron curtain collapsing, and so on. My folks weren’t (and aren’t) really into by The News (we never had a national paper in the house), but as @marckee noted above, with so few channels, TV bulletins were kinda unavoidable (unless you actively turned the TV off). Anyway, it wasn’t a depression thing, just raw confusion and upset at the way the information was being presented, with my young mind being unable to process it in terms of any sort of context. Upshot: TV news was actively avoided for the next few years and my worries subsided.

Aged 16, during lunch at my first weekend supermarket job, I started getting into the habit of buying a paper. Having no parental precedent, The Express seemed like a reasonable mid-market starting point. Took me a week to clock its awfulness (their daft crusade against alcopops was a main bone of contention, as I recall) and gravitated towards broadsheets on rotation. Remember The European? Into the 2000s it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to buy two or three papers. That abated as the internet and mobiles properly took off, but I still avidly followed The News through various online sources and watched C4 news nearly every day.

Two decades later, and my ability to give credence to just about any mainstream reporting or any news at all on the telly is shot to pieces. Over those two decades I’d already started to see the cycles and patterns and narratives form and repeat themselves. I suppose along the way, stuff like Brass Eye, No Logo/Adbusters (yeah, I know…) and Adam Curtis had done plenty to chip away at my faith in mainstream reporting, too. The coverage of the Scottish referendum was the nail in the coffin.

The past two years have been a tapering off while I’ve watched the Brexit referendum (a carbon copy of the laziness of the ScotRef reporting) and Trump’s ascent (and the aftermath of both) unfold. Neither are new. They’re just ramped-up versions of previous bullshit. And as the plastics thread shows, the real globally world-altering news can’t get a look in.

I still get email roundups from a select few sources to get a feel for what’s going on, but spend next to no time digesting it. Having said that, there’s obviously still loads of stuff worth reading - e.g. that Liberation summary that @anon30627475 linked to in the Iran thread was unexpectedly informative (albeit cloaked in a specific political leaning, but none the worse for that); and Holyrood magazine is quite good as it’s essentially a trade journal, so not really reliant on clickbait crap.

Gonna spend more time reading magazines like Delayed Gratification in the hope of staying abreast of current affairs in a calmer, more measured (healthier?) way. And here, of course (with my echo chamber detector set to max, naturally)!

In terms of whether these are good/bad or helpful/unhelpful media consumption choices, I’m not really convinced there’s a real link to whether you’re a good person or helping. There’s plenty of ways to be ‘part of the solution’ without needing to give time over to watching/reading The News.

tl;dr - No hot takes here, pal. Just some unedited thoughts spewed out on a lazy Friday afternoon. Take 'em or leave 'em.