Sep 6, 2020 01:24 AM
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articl...f=Rk9EBXHT
INTRO (Tyler Cowen): One of the most hotly debated questions among my friends and acquaintances lately is this: Is America headed for a future in which just about everyone has been canceled? Fortunately, while “cancel culture” and political correctness have become stronger and more influential over the last few years, these movements have built-in limitations. They will prove to be a durable element of American culture, but by no means a dominant one.
How do I know? I don’t, of course, but consider which recent developments have most captivated young people and grabbed their attention. The first is the gaming ecosystem Fortnite, with about 350 million global users. The second is the short video platform TikTok, which now has 80 million active users in the U.S. alone. Both are huge worlds unto themselves, and both resist easy generalization. But it is safe to say that but they are not bastions of political correctness.
The primary purpose of both is to entertain their users. While Fortnite offers non-egalitarian competitive gaming, based on violent combat, TikTok rewards brashness and irreverence. One of the main characteristics of PC culture is humorlessness. In a world where attention is dominated by entertainment, along with social bonding and networking, political correctness will not be the major cultural influence.
So what to make of the apparent growing strength of cancel culture and affiliated movements? Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said. It might be said on Twitter rather than on the evening news, or on 4Chan rather than on Facebook. But the sentiments will be out there, and many of them will be disturbing. The world has arrived at a place where just about every politically incorrect statement - and a response to it, not to mention every politically correct statement and a response to that - is published or recorded somewhere.
So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else... (MORE -details)
INTRO (Tyler Cowen): One of the most hotly debated questions among my friends and acquaintances lately is this: Is America headed for a future in which just about everyone has been canceled? Fortunately, while “cancel culture” and political correctness have become stronger and more influential over the last few years, these movements have built-in limitations. They will prove to be a durable element of American culture, but by no means a dominant one.
How do I know? I don’t, of course, but consider which recent developments have most captivated young people and grabbed their attention. The first is the gaming ecosystem Fortnite, with about 350 million global users. The second is the short video platform TikTok, which now has 80 million active users in the U.S. alone. Both are huge worlds unto themselves, and both resist easy generalization. But it is safe to say that but they are not bastions of political correctness.
The primary purpose of both is to entertain their users. While Fortnite offers non-egalitarian competitive gaming, based on violent combat, TikTok rewards brashness and irreverence. One of the main characteristics of PC culture is humorlessness. In a world where attention is dominated by entertainment, along with social bonding and networking, political correctness will not be the major cultural influence.
So what to make of the apparent growing strength of cancel culture and affiliated movements? Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said. It might be said on Twitter rather than on the evening news, or on 4Chan rather than on Facebook. But the sentiments will be out there, and many of them will be disturbing. The world has arrived at a place where just about every politically incorrect statement - and a response to it, not to mention every politically correct statement and a response to that - is published or recorded somewhere.
So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else... (MORE -details)
