On Blog-Baiting, Free Speech, Social Culture Wars And Who We Are

Writers on Medium and other platforms could be tiny, but mighty

Roaring Rivers

Currents, ripples, and torrents from Christyl Rivers, PhD.

What I hear from you is amplified

What writers/readers hear from one another is amplified, sometimes fought over. Most platforms owned by media and billionaires are loudest. We writers on Medium are more like dead crickets floating on obscure tributaries of massive rivers. The Amazon franchise comes to mind.

Nevertheless, Medium matters. Our little voices can speak of topics that are not just in the rushing, polarized, white water.

Every idea, and new information, flows downstream of what is most popular, and usually, most sensational.

When I don’t hear — or someone gets shy and doesn’t want to deal with the flack — those ripples of thoughts float into oblivion.

What we read, or think of it, does not usually get broadcast or space, because most people say nothing unless they feel something intense they’re compelled to say. Sometimes to shout.

It is always an absolute delight to hear from readers. When you comment you often make my day. When you disagree I am forced to think. When I disagree with you, I hope it makes you think.

Please comment to writers you read, and they respond to you, too.

I am called out on my “click bait” titles at times. This is fair. But also consider that platforms pulling in millions that Tuesday, and Medium writers who are pulling in four dollars that same day. Both need to attract clicks and readers. This click baiting is better understood as the difference between a globally broadcast GIF of a celebrity slip-up gaffe seen by millions, and a violinist with a plastic cup in the street who may actually have something to say.

Yes, we do live a lot with distractions like the movie star, but if we shut out the dissenting, or discontent voices, of those deemed disposable or invisible, we do so at our own possible demise.

Does this mean some baiters are not belfry bat-crap crazy? No. Some are. But they are more interesting at times than the monotony of spoon fed gossip and the usual white bread and circuses.

However, there is a lot of simple misunderstanding that zig-zags across the digital divide as well. Something worth clarifying is my stance on Nature versus Nurture, and the prevalent idea that our socialization is not our environment. Environment is what drives evolution. Social evolution is no exception.

But often when I refer to you and I living in an environment, we have been misled (by our cultural environment, ironically) to assume we are talking about the external, natural world, and our minds and abstract interior experience, is somehow a different world.

Due to epigenetics, and the tendency of one human lifetime to forget how the social environment evolved a generation before, we seem to forget that nature and nurture are not separate, but an interwoven weave.

Socialization and resulting physical environment change life. That’s why climate and geopolitics have, and will, change your life.

We are told everyday that nature and human beings are one, but we are also taught that we should appreciate and protect “nature” as if nature and environment is a separate thing. This leads to all sorts of confusion.

When reading an ecopsychologist, however, one should assume talking about nature and human nature are not just intertwined, but woven like waffles with gluten, butter, eggs, and syrup.

Earth and people are not different substances. We are interactive systems.

Little mouths and big mouths

Sometimes, I will say something about free speech, or culture wars. I am often expecting to have readers know that free speech is vary rare because media giants have vast range, huge power, and sticky tentacles.

(There’s creepy things lurking in the water!) Elon Musk, or Zuck, or Bezos, or even clowns with orange make-up have free speech. Teeny little pismire peons like me and you that have megaphones the size of cilium do not. There is simply no way for voices like yours and mine to be “free” in the sense of having the same amplified, cultural impact.

But, as Walt Whitman so astutely observed about the pismire(ant):

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren…

(WW goes on, well worth a read — and he is so prescient as to what twentieth century science would soon reveal as our related and shared DNA and our crucial interdependency upon each other, that he may as well have been a leaf of grass on the winds of change. But I digress. Poetry and Science will do that to you.)

Anyway. Megaphones and MAGA memes:

In this sense, being free is not free. Being woke may as well be the same as being asleep. Being far right, in danger of being “replaced,” may as well be the same as being a cultural nobody.

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