People are not even talking about the same things and this is dangerous.
I don't think most people realize that many times we think we're talking about the same thing, but in fact, we're not actually on the same page with the underlying premise or even basic facts.
I feel compelled to keep pointing this out, because people have different ideas about topics and the way that meanings of things can work is that people can think they're talking about the same thing and in fact not realize they're not in agreement of actual premises or the facts involved. I think that partly it's the way things work with the information space and media as it is and social media silos, but I think there are also forces out there who are able to manipulate the situation as well.
Whatever the cause I think the only answer is to start speaking in specifics rather than shorthand or buzzwords or sound bites. We need to name specific things happening, and spell out what we mean, not just make off-hand comments and assume everyone's on the same page, because I can guarantee you, not everyone is on the same page.
This has become very very obvious with what's happening right now in US politics. There are a great many people who truly believe that the dispute over Trump's anti-DEI agenda is all about just a superficial argument about superficial words - that it's just to create an artificial argument between Republicans and Democrats. Gin up the MAGA base and trigger the libs, with disingenuous actors trying to fundraise on culture war bullshit. In fact, that is actually happening too, so it's not wrong to notice that. But it's not just superficial. But people often have no idea that actual material damage is being done. They don't know that anti-DEI means erasure or demonization of certain people, not just censorship of certain words.
They have no idea these anti-DEI policies aren't just getting rid of terms, they're undermining ADA and 504 rights because it's considered "woke" and discriminatory against able-bodied young healthy people. I'm not sure where the disconnect is with this - how people aren't putting it together that DEIA refers to policies that are put in place so people follow ADA or civil rights and discrimination laws. But that's what's going on - people aren't stopping to engage in critical thinking about this and asking -. Who will do accessibility or FMLA or whatever at jobs if there's nobody who's allowed to work on disability issues because it's "woke DEI"? That was the first question I've had about this in terms of the federal worker RTO where they said that people with disability waivers could keep teleworking but my first thought was - who's going to even determine that if they're not allowed to do the A in DEIA?
People sometimes apparently think it's just about censoring certain terminology that some don't like - and maybe using other terms. I think word censorship or a book ban is already a case of an impingement of rights. Not to mention that this type of censorship has historically been a precursor to violence or even massacres. But again, many people are not necessarily thinking this through. I'm told that there's some people in academia that aren't fully getting that it's not just about censoring certain terms and just doing the same thing without using those words. I guess they think they could just censor the language so as to appease MAGA. But how is that going to work? If you have to present relevant information, or for example, design a medicine study, and you cannot do anything to include diversity or different genders, basically you're left with only being able to include white males like it used to be... because including diversity would be "DEI" obviously. You can't describe diversity in the study, you can't do such a study! There's already a skewed result in the medical science literature that doesn't properly address women - half the population - in healthcare treatments.
So most people probably don't even know that these anti-environmental reviews have led to a freeze in funding for things like historic abandoned coal mine industrial site pollution mitigation and land subsidence public safety measures because of the mere existence of "environmental impact" of fossil fuels being involved in this. So no mitigation for stuff that could cause explosions and that has already caused fatality. They have no idea that because of these funding freezes states like Pennsylvania are going out on a limb and taking on the debt which will be left upon the taxpayers holding the bag if the federal funds never come through. Right now the Dem governor of PA is shielding the parties involved from the consequences of the spending freeze by keeping everything going with Pennsylvania funds pending a lawsuit at the federal government - but what happens if that runs out before enough people who will feel the impact are fully informed and decide to speak up, lobby, and organize?
This failure to communicate is leading our communities to keep heading down a road where the bridge is out, but many people driving us there through the fog are unaware of what's up ahead.
This has me feeling a bit alarmed. How about you?
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
The Cognitive Crucible - #212 Libby Lange on Algorithmic Cognitive Warfare Information Professionals Association Dec 17, 2024 John Bicknell: “so the idea here is o try to get people into smaller cocoons of their own maybe their own information echo chambers or something like that and then as a cocoon it's easier to influence the cocoon of people but at a society level you have all these disparate groups of people that don't necessarily align very well with one another anymore” Libby Lange: “yeah and you know in one of the articles that goes through a cognitive operation kind of stage by stage the goal of moving people into groups is also that people will sort of self-police within the group and sort of self-police behavior thus kind of making each group controllable depending on sort of how you insert content that is targeting that group which is kind of a weird sort of wonky way to think about it but essentially creating these groups that are I guess you could say more manageable almost where if you have a really cohesive society where people are really working together then as sort of an outside adversary that's not a very manageable population right but if you have people split off and you understand kind of the workings of that group or why that group comes together the way it does what their sort of central organizing issue is or their central organizing beliefs then they may be easier to kind of manage John Bicknell: “divide and conquer” Libby Lange: “exactly”
The Home Front podcast - Fascism, Modern Masculinity, and TikTok with Jonathan Buchwalter Feb 6, 2025 "For the Putin regime the state controlled media will actively contradict itself in the same broadcast and you will get um for example I was listening to a podcast uh where an expert on Russian propaganda was being interviewed and they described a plane crash where the plane crash was real and the dates and times presented were real but all of the news coverage is speculation about what happened where the facts of the issue beyond the absolute concrete facts like day and time they changed throughout the day where the same broadcasters would run different versions of events such that when you leave the the screen and you go and interact with people in the world you're both only vaguely talking about the same event and this prevents the Russian population from really engaging with reality at all that they don't know anything about what is happening around them because any version of it is not doctored or made glorious or made defamed instead it's just bullshit. Just this constant stream of well that was wrong and now it's this and that was wrong and now it's this you don't know what truth is and in the end state whether it's the American South or not in Germany or modern Russia is a passive population is a group of people who will take what they're given without complaint."