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It strikes me that Facebook is just about the worst place for discourse about anything political or socially controversial.
If you have a blog, and you want to make public posts about things likely to incite controversy, it's quite easy to be anonymous; and even if you blog under your own name, it's not likely that your friendly acquaintances and friends-of-friends and that guy you met once at a party who seemed nice are going to be Googling you. (Generally, if an offline friend has a blog, I'll read it at least sporadically unless it makes me claw my eyes out with terrible grammar or terrible opinions... but they have to tell me about it first.)
If you're talking to acquaintances about political stuff, I think that most people have the social savvy to keep an eye on body language and do the awkward-conciliatory "I'm sure we agree more than we disagree" subject-change. Or to just avoid talking about political stuff with acquaintances.
And if you're talking with friends, you know where they stand on a lot of subjects, and you have to come to terms somehow with the differences of opinion you have or you don't stay friends. And there's never an easy answer to how much weight you put on staying friends versus standing up for your own beliefs, but being friends ought to mean that you take that question seriously.
But if you post on facebook, then you inevitably end up getting in ridiculous fights with your aunts or cousins or friends-of-friends where there's not enough goodwill between you to smooth over the differences or fight them out in a caring way. And yet, you kind of resent destroying what goodwill there was over things that shouldn't make that much difference.
No -- this hasn't really happened to me, or at least, I tend to drop the fight and back down if I see it starting. (I'm lucky -- my family is mostly as liberal and as conflict-averse as I am, but also, I tend to not friend acquaintances on Facebook.) But I've seen it happen enough times that I can't help feeling that this is not the way things ought to be.
And on the other hand, the more I write about this, the more I think that maybe the old-fashioned politeness where you just don't talk about politics and religion is gone and not coming back, and maybe that's as much of a good thing as it is a bad thing. "Shouldn't make that much difference" is a lot easier to say if you're on the side that has power, rather than the other way around. Maybe we need to find a whole different set of answers to the questions of how people with radically different opinions and ways of thinking can live in community with each other. Maybe we'll even find those answers on Facebook.
In the meantime, though, maybe I'll just post about cooking.
If you have a blog, and you want to make public posts about things likely to incite controversy, it's quite easy to be anonymous; and even if you blog under your own name, it's not likely that your friendly acquaintances and friends-of-friends and that guy you met once at a party who seemed nice are going to be Googling you. (Generally, if an offline friend has a blog, I'll read it at least sporadically unless it makes me claw my eyes out with terrible grammar or terrible opinions... but they have to tell me about it first.)
If you're talking to acquaintances about political stuff, I think that most people have the social savvy to keep an eye on body language and do the awkward-conciliatory "I'm sure we agree more than we disagree" subject-change. Or to just avoid talking about political stuff with acquaintances.
And if you're talking with friends, you know where they stand on a lot of subjects, and you have to come to terms somehow with the differences of opinion you have or you don't stay friends. And there's never an easy answer to how much weight you put on staying friends versus standing up for your own beliefs, but being friends ought to mean that you take that question seriously.
But if you post on facebook, then you inevitably end up getting in ridiculous fights with your aunts or cousins or friends-of-friends where there's not enough goodwill between you to smooth over the differences or fight them out in a caring way. And yet, you kind of resent destroying what goodwill there was over things that shouldn't make that much difference.
No -- this hasn't really happened to me, or at least, I tend to drop the fight and back down if I see it starting. (I'm lucky -- my family is mostly as liberal and as conflict-averse as I am, but also, I tend to not friend acquaintances on Facebook.) But I've seen it happen enough times that I can't help feeling that this is not the way things ought to be.
And on the other hand, the more I write about this, the more I think that maybe the old-fashioned politeness where you just don't talk about politics and religion is gone and not coming back, and maybe that's as much of a good thing as it is a bad thing. "Shouldn't make that much difference" is a lot easier to say if you're on the side that has power, rather than the other way around. Maybe we need to find a whole different set of answers to the questions of how people with radically different opinions and ways of thinking can live in community with each other. Maybe we'll even find those answers on Facebook.
In the meantime, though, maybe I'll just post about cooking.