So as a follow up in some degree of my musings a few weeks ago in “Dear World…”, something has been stirring in the various universes of Social Media again. It’s always been there, but many people don’t usually notice it. Now people do know about it though, it’s interesting to see the exposure of people covering stuff up recently. What I’m talking in relation to is the discrimination of people based on race, religion and sexuality.
Politically, it’s hard to ignore the way the American border is under question with the Trump administration threatening to close it off to anyone whom happens to be from a certain country with a certain faith. It’s happening the other way too, particularly with every other conflict mentioned in the middle east at the moment being based around faith. And I can’t fail the mention the controversy on both sides surrounding the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.
Entertainment and the media (our supposed means of escaping our current world) aren’t safe either. The recent exposure of YouTube with it’s ‘Restricted’ content filter removing a lot of LGBTQ+ content has hit blogs and social media around the web recently and for film, music and book buffs in the last couple of years, it’s noticeable that artists of these fields are seen to be really pushing their inclusion of diversity to noticeable levels (often counteracting the point) such as pointing out characters as homosexual or a specific gender in films or overdoing/poorly planning characters in books and films. Now, whilst it’s great that people are being more inclusive with their work, it’s not something to stick a neon sign on as if you deserve a reward for doing it. The whole idea around diversity settling issues with gender, race and religious equality is that it is just that, equal. Holding up metaphorical neon signs to go “Look, my film has all female main characters!” or saying things like “in my adaption, I made sure that X was bisexual and reinterpreted Y as an Asian person” isn’t really going to do anything other than shine a light on them because of the features and barriers you were apparently trying to remove and provoking the argument back again for your audience.
Everyone is entitled and everyone has the right to an opinion, even if you don’t agree with it. But if you differ, it doesn’t give you the right to go forcing yours upon them. Many people believe that by enforcing their broad opinion, they’re doing good in the world (such as blocking Muslims from entering your country, banning sexuality because you thought it wrong or persecuting your own people for not following your particular strain of the religion). Let me ask you this honestly, just how is that benefiting? How does that solve the problem you think you’re having.
Neutralisation follows a number of definitions. The greatest one though, means nobody against anybody, rather than merely eliminating those who might compete with your interests.
But that’s just my opinion and if you have a differing one, that’s totally fine. Just don’t force me to change mine is all I ask as I would say not to take my post as fact either.
Whatever you think, just sort yourselves out world. I’m tired about hearing all this globally childish playground bullying in my news online, on TV and on radio (so much so ironically I’m almost relying exclusively on my curated RSS feeds in feedly to let me know the going ons in the world). Get your *ahem* selves together, grow a pair of your respective genitalia (whatever you identify yourself as) and keep the concept of Compressors, Filters and Gates in mediums such as video and audio production for processing data rather than trying to use those tactics in the real world and learn to negotiate rather than dictating who you think is right (because who in reality can moderate the moderators?)
I’ll let you figure that out.
Mike