theauspolchronicles:

We should always be mindful of echo chambers. I’ve learned a lot on Tumblr and it has shaped my understanding of the world and opened me up to new ideas and understandings about ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and how they intersect with our lives. But I’ve been on here a long time and I’ve seen how an echo chamber has encouraged a certain zeal in people’s desires to be socially progressive has lead to a toxic call out culture and an increasingly intense scrutiny trying to sniff out every vague nuance of a micro-aggression to the point where if something even sounds like it’s not pure SJW Approved™ it must be ruined and there’s no redemption arc. I’ve seen people tear celebrities to shreds over perceived slights that, upon further investigation, are not the problematic behaviours they appeared to be. It was like someone read a misleading headline and decided they knew the whole news story.

No one is pure. That’s not a defence against bad behaviour or excuse, that is merely a fundamental truth we must deal with when navigating our lives. The quest for social justice must be a self-aware one if it is to achieve anything. We can’t have progress if our end-goals become divorced from the realities of the world that no one who isn’t in the echo-chamber can connect with us.

Tumblr encouraged a generation of socially progressive and inclusive thinkers, and then some of them just they stayed here and festered in an echo chamber until the reasonable beliefs got churned around so much the only way to go was more and more extreme. Because that’s what echo chambers do. They amplify something, warp it, and then make you utterly convinced of it’s normalcy through gradual reinforcement, even though to an outsider it has become so unrecognisable that it’s bizarre and hostile.

Stop for a moment. Think. Examine things from a different perspective. I hope to always be a socially progressive and inclusive person who is mindful and aware of the struggles of others and the different ways privilege affects peoples’ lives… but I also want to make sure that the way I go about that is a logical, reasonable, and inclusive manner. I want to see my generation understand the trappings of social media and the environment we live in so that we can avoid becoming the outlandish parodies of ourselves that the right portrays us as.