A place to share and discuss stories from The Onion, Clickhole, and other satire.
Great Satire Writing:
I live in the US and my interactions on the fediverse are more often genuine, rational and open minded than they are in person and it isn't even close.
People are too exhausted and broken down by daily life to have interesting discussions anyways, everything just becomes discussions about work usually.
This is the reality of living in a broken society and is why broadly excluding youth from social media is tantamount to an act of manslaughter.
Not sure I agree with that last part. Youth is the time where you are supposed learn to have interesting discussions with people in real life, before the overwhelming topics of work and kids become the focus of your life. Social Media does absolutely nothing for that social learning process, and seems to actively harm it.
I'm old enough I only had social media in highschool, and knowing how bad kids are in elementary and junior high I think having access to social media and messaging apps then would have destroyed me. The level of bullying you can pull off with Snapchat or WhatsApp groups is cruel and unusual.
Where is your proof? Certainly letting corporations design social media to be addictive as possible is detrimental but your claim that social media does nothing for the social learning process is inherently absurd.
Social media is humans socializing. Yes corporations have made social media into a toxic thing, but that is the doing of corporations not humans.
Human communication is far more than just the words themselves. In face to face communication, there's whole layers of tone, facial expressions and body language included along with the words themselves. Whether you consciously know it or not, you interpret these non-verbal reactions in real time while talking to someone. Then there's the simple fact of the time delay inherent to online communication that doesn't exist in face to face communication.
All told, online social media does not even come close to replicating actual in person socializing, let alone replacing it.
I love improv and blackbox theater, I understand this intimately. I will never argue for entirely replacing in person interaction, of course in person interaction has the highest immediate potential for saturating your senses with social information.
However you are making a basic thinking error here that environments with a higher saturation of simultaneous social signals are superiro to more focused or abstracted ones.
I have had many intimate conversations on a phone with someone that may never have quite happened the same way, or the words would not have found a way out perhaps if the conversation had happened in a different context and in person. This isn't about being afraid to say something in person, it is rather that the medium of a phone conversation allows a unique form of intimacy that is different but not better than in person interaction. The same thing with writing a letter, or even a heartfelt text.
Don't reduce the quality of my argument by suggesting I think social media replaces in person interaction, that is not what I am arguing in the slightest.
I also think it is extremely reductive to call digital spaces inhuman simply because humans cannot physically/literally fit inside the digital spaces. What it means to be human and have human conversations is way more nuanced and harder to pin down than just "are two human bodies making noises at one another in same room".
One example of this nuance is that for many people the capacity to explore removed, abstracted identities online at different parts of their life was crucial to them finding themselves more wholistically. Social interaction and the fulfilment of our social nature isn't just a raw calculation of time physically spent in the same room as other humans.
To put it succintly, you are essentially arguing color photography is inherently better than black and white photography because more information always is better and more meaningful/impactful. That is NOT how we are wired which isn't to say that color isn't important in our lives.
Where is your proof?
Ah yes, very genuine, rational, and open minded of you.
I get it, you're exhausted too, but this kind of bait and switch isn't fun. Don't make your problems other people's problems.
How is this a bait and switch?
I asked you for proof how does that mean I am not being genuine rational or open minded?
you
incorrect
As for how asking for proof isn't open minded;
Your conversation was informal. You didn't provide evidence, let alone proof, so to immediately jump someone's throat to ask for proof when someone responds in kind speaks to an unwillingness to consider other people's ideas like you want yours to be considered.
This is not genuine, because you are pressuring people to accept a deceptive social situation where your words matter as much as their proofs.
This is not rational, because you are discouraging people from having a productive conversation with you, leading you to learn less.
This is not open-minded, because you are refusing to consider other's point of view without a high standard of evidence.