when you find awful Discourse on Tumblr and immediately tell the squad

[cimorene]

I just read an UNIRONIC Tumblr wall of text unironically reblogged by someone I follow that argues that the rise of antis is due to the advent of 24-hr news "inventing" punditry (because, they argue, they had to, because not enough real things happen in the world to fill a whole day with news otherwise), and hence that punditry didn't exist until the late 90s, and that the spread of punditry and commentary on the news directly caused the erosion of the societal concepts of truth and facts, leading to the organic evolution of antis when young children were naturally led by overexposure to opinion writings and under exposure to fact-based news imparting to mistakenly assume their opinions about reality were more important than reality itself. Another poster then adds that the disappearance of real journalism in the 1990s means that all children brought up after that era aren't taught how to detect bullshit, which used to be learned naturally by exposure to good quality tv news apparently. And then a clown car appears and the last poster emerges and in complete earnestness explains that all of this is actually the result of postmodernism, which they personify as a malignant force actively desirous of eradicating the concept of 'truth' entirely.

And then there's a bunch of tags and stuff earnestly telling everybody to read the whole wall of text because it's really good.



Now my eyes are metaphorically bleeding and I've still got vertigo from the fifteen seconds I read the last response thinking it was sarcasm before the awful truth dawned on me.

Quick question: is a take's heat solely determined by its stupidity or is it partly freshness? Because this last take - 'antis are because postmodernism' - is in one sense SCORCHING, but OTOH 'postmodernism is actively trying to destroy society because it hates truth' is a take so stale that I learned ABOUT it at university as HISTORY. History that happened in part before I was born.

Comments

[makamu]

I have read that post and while the original poster and their point made some sense to me as one possible strand in a possible explanation of the anti phenomenon, the postmodernism take is... yeah, like you said.

[cimorene]

There were a lot of true facts and observations in the first part, just... put into a blender with a lot of stunningly wrong arguments and contentions.

Like that punditry was invented in the late 1990s.

Or that there isn't enough stuff happening in a world of (then) 6 billion people to have potentially filled the day with actual news if they had wanted to.

Or that the notion of talking about one's opinion wasn't widely accepted in society until a few decades ago (because punditry, that wasn't invented yet, was going to introduce it for the first time).

And most importantly, their central argument - that exposure to people talking about and debating their opinions would naturally give rise to a belief that nothing matters and truth doesn't exist - is plainly ludicrous.

[alexseanchai]

there isn't enough stuff happening in a world of (then) 6 billion people to have potentially filled the day with actual news if they had wanted to

I think a key point there is those last four words. Filling twenty-four hours with actual news by looking for more actual news requires expanding the category of "newsworthy" to include a bunch more people and topics than the news network, or (possibly more to the point) the news network's owner, wants (or wants their audience) to care about.

[cimorene]

I agree, this is a much more accurate diagnosis of what ails the American 24-hour news cycle!

[makamu]

To be fair, it has been a while since I read that tumblr post, and I have a tendency to supplement posts like this with my own knowledge, which tends to make claims in posts like this less strong and so I probably read the post as more reasonable than it is.

I read it as being more about the advent of news that are focused on the headlines and the scoop than on the analysis being the baseline for news production even in the "prestige" newspapers? Of course opinions are a big part of journalism and always have been, even for newspapers that claimed otherwise.

At the sane time: I read their main point differently than you (but see above about how this might be me and/or my memory): I read them as saying that the greater focus on the stating of an opinion on a range of issues as fast as possible and the speeding up of the news cycle led to a) an even greater blurring of the line between a more descriptive part of news and the more analytic and opinion-based/ opinionated part of news and b) may create the impression that takes are the equivalent of an informed opinion (because being provided with the basis for an informed opinion is the democratic ideal of news. And it is that belief that partly informs anti anti-intellectualism?

Just to be clear: I agree that blaming that on "postmodernism" is ludicrous and shows precisely what I read the OP as doing. It remains daft even when I replace it with "post-structuralism". And the OP may itself be way overstated.

[cimorene]

You mean you suggest that it's not opinion content itself that was novel but the context of punditry being presented WITH news that created a confusion by... subconsciously positioning them as of equal status? I mean... I don't think that's what they actually said, but if it was what they meant - not implausibly -, it still doesn't really hang together coherently in my view, although there's no question that the substitution of random opinions for expertise in journalism and public discourse is strongly anti-intellectual and anti-intellectualism is on the rise.

[makamu]

You mean you suggest that it's not opinion content itself that was novel but the context of punditry being presented WITH news that created a confusion by... subconsciously positioning them as of equal status?

That's more coherently phrased than my post up there was, but yes, that is the way I read that post in order to make sense of it.

I agree that the argument would have to be laid out a bit more coherently and/or substantiated, but that reading at least made sense to me

[brownbetty]

Maybe you could characterize the rise of antis as a response to postmodernism? You could argue the postmodern destabilization of categories is uncomfortable and the antis are trying to reinforce them?

[cimorene]

Those things are both probably loosely true and it WOULD perhaps be useful to describe Anti-ness as opposed to category destabilization!

That's the opposite of what the post was doing however. It was more 'postmodernism connives at and slowly achieves the destruction of the notion of truth, in part by creating the monsters of 24-hr news and punditry in the 1990s, and as a result antis grow up without knowing what bullshit is and thinking that representation=endorsement'.

[brownbetty]

That is... not how I would characterize the relationship of the 24 hours news-cycle to postmodernism.

[princessofgeeks]

The stupidity piled upon stupidity here is just overwhelming. I don't even know where to start. OMG.

Anyone who thinks TV news was good in the 1980s was not paying attention or was not born yet. Or.

I just.

I got nuthin.

[cimorene]

That part made me think of you, haha. After I got done rocking back and going "WOW."