Leahs Gedanken

Tonight, I had an interesting thought that I want to share, especially with those who don’t understand the request for CWs (content warnings) for political news and stuff yet. Maybe you’ve already heard about the right-wing propaganda tactic of “flooding the zone with shit”. It is especially used in the US these days. For example, by the Trump administration if he sings so many executive orders that you can’t keep up. It’s a tactic to overwhelm you. To make you freeze by the avalanche of competing stories you read and want to act on. And they know that many of the stories will get debunked or overturned by a court. But this is okay because they could still get their important, potentially a little less extreme stuff done without bigger protest.

Here is an English article explaining the tactic: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation And for the German audience, a German one: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/flood-the-zone-warum-trumps-flut-an-dekreten-und-provokationen-methode-hat-100.html

But let’s come back to the fediverse and the CW stuff. Social media is like flooding the zone on steroids. “News” and stuff gets posted, shared, posted again with other words, and so on. It’s an amplifier for an already overwhelming amount of news. This is combined with the problem that much of the shared stuff is a) noting you can act on. For example, I, as a German, can’t fix the US politics; it’s too fare away. I can’t even fix the German politics alone. And I can’t act on the truly horrific events in other parts of the world either. That’s nothing that should make up page one of the news. And b) even if everyone would only post on two or three topics that are important to them, these few topics of thousands of people create an avalanche again. So this is an inherent issue of social media, even if no one is actively abusing it. Social media is making us numb and frozen, and that is shit.

If you hear experts talking about strategies to overcome this freezing and numbness, they tell you that you should focus on two or three topics that are important to you and ignore the rest for the moment. This doesn’t mean there is nobody acting on the topics you ignore or that they are less critical. Most probably, there are plenty of people working on every topic. Even if this is not the case, it’s better to work on some of them than neither.

And this is the moment of CWs, or CNs which stands for content notes, as I like to call them. They are not only a tool to warn others about traumatizing content; they are a tool to manage the own attention. To be able to keep acting instead of freezing. Good CNs tell me what I have to expect if I click on that post or link you share. I can ask myself if this is a topic I’m currently acting on too, then it’s fine to read it. Or if this is a topic for later because I want to act on other things for now. And another option is that I would like to rest for the moment and maybe look into it later. While acting is important, rest is too, because without rest we all burn out, and then we can’t act anymore. So using CNs or CWs or subjects, it’s not relevant how they are called, is not only a way to support your fellows who work to make the world better, is also a significant way to not help those who try to overwhelm us. One could call it an imperative.