I’ve been thinking lately about being ‘nice’ on the internet, and on my own behaviour. Now, it’s not that I think my behaviour has been somehow horribly wrong, and I should necessarily change it to a huge degree, because our culture has a tendency to conflate ‘nice’ with ‘good’ (witness how often awful behaviour is excused because it is civil, for instance, or the reverse). Not to mention, I’ve been ‘behaving’ online since the mid 1990s, so to suddenly think I can magically change such is a flawed assumption to begin with.
Rather, with that caveat, I’m thinking about how I can recast what I put online as ‘positive’. Now, this is not to say I should somehow bring a blind eye to negative things that are happening in the world (for I feel that to say nothing is often to be complicit in the inequality of the status quo), but rather in pausing and thinking strongly about am I offering an alternative here. Critical appraisal is necessary, and not all critical appraisal requires an alternative vision or option, but I do wonder at if I’m constructing other paths for people to consider rather than merely yelling rage into the void.
Nor do I think this is something I haven’t been doing, but rather, am I doing enough of it? And there is certainly something to be said for yelling into the void; too often we think our rage is to be something to contained, to be discredited in others, when often in-&-of-itself it can be a valid and reasonable reaction to something. Leaving aside the fact that women’s rage (and particularly the rage of women of colour) is not only invalidated, but is used to invalidate their reactions to justifiable inequities, I am asking myself, what can I do in addition to contributing my rage?
Now, this is a conflict I find in myself, because women in general are given social credence in our society by being ‘nice’, by thinking of others in their reactions to things socially. “How am I impacting others in my reaction to this?” is a feminine coded question in our society, as it prioritises the feelings of others over our own feelings, regardless of the validity (or not) of our reaction, and how much we might need that reaction in order to be mentally healthy and simply deal with the inequalities of our position in society.
And this is particularly the case, I have to acknowledge as a white woman, for women of colour, whose ‘niceness’ is even more precarious than my own. Behaviours that I get credited for as ‘nice’ have a wider aspect to them (due to my social privilege as a white woman) than women who are not white (in other words, I have more ‘give’ in my range of behaviours), and so in playing into that range of acceptability, am I reinforcing the relative narrowness for women who are not white by not challenging that width of acceptability, by using my privilege to push at those boundaries? Am I letting myself be comfortable and unchallenging by remaining within the boundaries that my privilege affords, without using such to push such?
This is a question that I have not as yet answered, I will admit. But that’s perhaps the strength of writing a blog; I perhaps don’t have to have all the answers. Or perhaps, that’s merely my white privilege speaking.
So, that all said, what can I be doing better to be more contributive online?
And that’s where my thinking arrives at: what am I contributing here? And this is a deliberate question to get away from questions of ‘nice’ vs ‘good’ (because honestly, you don’t have to be a nice person to be a good person, and as above, both these terms are structurally coded along gender and race lines – as well as other structural lines of inequality). For all its problems (and its problems are myriad and widely articulated) online discussion is where the majority of our discussion occurs today (regardless of the particular platform it aligns on – and no, it’s not merely a question of removing anonymity, that’s been widely debunked, as anyone who has looked at transcripts of historical political discussions will tell you). And no, again, merely saying “we should all be nicer to one another” isn’t a useful construction, because as I have stated above, what is considered ‘niceness’ or ‘civility’ is deliberately coded to privilege those that already have access to positions of authority over those who do not (hence, merely replicating those norms of civility will merely replicate those inequities of access).
One of the things I’ve often said in engagements online is that I am not trying to convince the person that I am engaging with of a different position (the data shows that this is extremely difficult, for all our wishes that we are rational individuals, we take far less information to be gospel in confirmation of our existing positions than information required for us to change one of those positions; it’s something like 3 or 4 to 1). What I’m doing in my engagements is thinking more about the position who is witnessing that engagement; showing the absurdity, the inhumanity, the simplicity of what the other is arguing. And yes, sometimes that involves not being nice to them.
However, that is often, if I’m honest with myself, a post-hoc justification for something I want to do. There is something wonderfully good feeling about being the righteous hand of justice, of being the avenging angel, of smiting someone who deserves to be smote. A lot of what the Right calls ‘virtue signalling’ is exactly that, but not in the negative sense the Right superficially means; it is about literally signalling what is wrong and what is correct to a wider audience; to say it is not right to say things about immigrants, LGBTQIA people, to people of colour, etc. Again, however, how much of my motivation here is about doing that, or is that outcome a nice side effect of my true motivation: the good feeling I get in being the one to smite.
Hence my question about being contributive. As someone of privilege, am I better served by shutting up and merely amplifying the voices of those that are heard less? That has an obvious answer more often than not: yes. Like, for instance, amplifying the voice of Roxanne Gay over those that would excuse the behaviour of the Covington Catholic boys. That answer is a no-brainer and I do wish more people with privilege would realise that shutting up and letting less privileged groups speak (and speak together from those groups), and assisting to amplifying those voices, is one of the strongest things we can do.
But I follow a bunch of women scholars and activists that do perhaps walk this line of being contributive better than I. Whose critical analysis of the world around them is goal orientated in such a way that I could do better at emulating. I admire these women, and while I don’t think they’re perfect either, they’re people I see doing good work, and when I am at my best it’s them I like to think I am being like.
So, how do I do this? Part of it is this self-reflection that this blog post is about (initially this was going to be a twitter tweet thread, but I think within the first paragraph of writing this I realised that it was going to be a blog post if I was going to do any justice to both my thoughts and the topic). I want to be challenging, and I want to make people uncomfortable. I like myself when I do that towards a positive end. But I need to ensure that it’s the end I am focused on, and not merely being challenging and making people uncomfortable (please note, I am not saying NOT making people uncomfortable … for if people remain comfortable, is change actually happening? This is something I thought on lately in Auckland regarding the Pride March and how profoundly uncomfortable a lot of people were made in, rightly, not allowing police to march in uniform).
So as such, to do this, I think critical self-reflection is crucial. What is my reaction here? Why do I feel this way? How is my desired reaction contributing to making things better? How is my desired reaction about fulfilling that immediate desire regardless of the positiveness of the contribution that I might be making? And importantly, how does my reaction reflect existing social structures of inequality?
And it’s this latter thing that I want to touch on in finishing this post. So many of our reactions to things are a product not of our conscious thought, but rather are post-hoc justifications based on being made to feel uncomfortable about something, and so we find a ‘rational’ reason to justify our subconscious recoil from a social norm being broken. We see that person as ‘bad’ because they did something ‘wrong’ and then regardless of our critical appraisal as to something being wrong or not, we find a conscious reason to justify them being ‘bad’ (and hence, we’re justified in our reaction towards discounting them or attacking them). The thing you have to realise in that reaction, is that our negative feelings here might have more to do with us being uncomfortable with social norms being broken than the actual ‘rational’ reason we tell ourselves, but that those social norms are about ensuring social inequalities remain in place (social norms are about, at their core, ensuring the status quo remains unchanged after all, for better or ill).
And as such, as a starting point for being more contributive in my online discussion (or perhaps rather, more consciously contributive) I feel like I need to be more self-reflexive in my writing. To pause, to think, and then ask myself a) do I need to say something here, b) would it help, c) (importantly) what’s my real motivation in doing so, d) what is really going on here, and e) at what level are my actions operating at; am I merely replicating social norms in challenging someone or some concept or am I actually challenging the structure behind those norms? What structural level of critical analysis is my thinking and articulation operating at?
Please note, this is not about challenging online behaviour. Sometimes ‘pile-ons’ are justified, sometimes we SHOULD be rightly calling out media & political figures with rage and anger because of the power and negativity of their voices (and particularly so when their voices are voices of privilege), sometimes deplatforming someone to ensure the power their voice has to dehumanise is diminished is required (because we desperately need a more nuanced understanding of the power of speech than the historic Enlightenment one), etc, etc, etc. Rather, this about critical thinking as positive, as contributive, in my online speech … in asking, why are we doing what we’re doing, and can we do so better (but in that, also thinking about what ‘better’ might look like, not in intellectually lazy and oversimplified manners that a call for ‘civility’ would embody).
So, not really an answer to the question I started with here, but maybe a path?
MacChick Academic 