The Opinion Pageant §

Metadata §

• Author: Gurwinder
• Full Title: The Opinion Pageant
• Category:#articles
• Date read: 2022-08-28
• URL: https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-opinion-pageant?s=w

Key takeaways §

• The low-context structure of social media platforms forces you to take a stance and express your opinions as a way to relate to others

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Highlights §

• The transition from a world in which people interact in person to one in which people interact through text led to a shift in the way we define and judge people. With little visibility of a person’s deeds, we had to focus on their words. And so we began to define people primarily by their opinions.
• The result is that people feel compelled to take a stance on everything.
• Digital society has become a beauty contest for beliefs, an opinion pageant.
• there’s no need to understand a complex world if you can just blame everything on bigotry.
• constantly calling out bigotry makes one look unbigoted, compassionate, and socially aware—all values with high social capital.
• But the worst thing about the culture war is that it perpetuates the opinion pageant. When people become divided into factions, there becomes even more pressure to pick a side and have an opinion,
• The result is that even more people take a stance on issues they know little about.
• If you want to know someone’s true nature, look beyond their words, and scrutinise the one aspect of their character that’s costly to fake—their actions.