A few weeks before Christmas, Black Eyed Peas’ original “Where is the Love?” came on the radio in a moment of serendipity, as I was reflecting on the state of our world. With the news so full of hateful rhetoric, brutality, greed and protectionism, yes, where is the love?
Perhaps one answer can be found in the digital world. Easy access to social media networks via smartphones offers affordances that have changed our communications, as the challenges of time, place and space have been completely redefined. In 2009, Panayiota Tsatsou articulated the critical role of digital media in “challenging historically significant concepts of time and space, changing how people shape their identities and extending the scope of physical and psychological mobility in today’s globalised world.” Current digital technologies are a much-used conduit for conversations between like-minded individuals who can now easily find each other, through geofilters or simply searching a hashtag, anytime and anywhere, resulting in a social game-changer.
Seeking out affinity groups and the sense of belonging they offer, supports identity-development and self-acceptance, whether the affinity is within, or outside of, dominant cultural norms (publics and counterpublics respectively). Nia Cantey and Cara Robinson backed this up in Hashtag Publics’ “#BlackTwitter: Making Waves as a Social Media Subculture” where they stated “A large diverse society…contains many groups needing to compete and contest for power in a negotiated space….Access to a space, or sphere, for the creation of identity is crucial.” #BlackTwitter, #MeToo, and the recent 2018 Women’s March are just a few examples of counterpublics living up to their twofold potential for empowerment and critique.
But, in our attention-deficit, information-overloaded lives, it’s not surprising that our seemingly human desire to label, categorize and generalize kicks in. The difficulty is that these strategies all too often result in a “single story” stereotype, as shared by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her powerful TedTalk.
The danger lies not only in the overly simplistic view, but also its laser-focus on difference, at the expense of how we might be similar. As Adichie points out, every time we tap into a label, a stereotype, or a “single story” for understanding, we rob people of dignity. None of us are comprised of a single story, and I would suggest everyone (no matter our race, gender, age or religion) can recall coming up against a prevalent stereotype being applied to us, or our choices, and how that felt. Yet, despite this lived experience, we continue to “single-story” others.
By its very definition, the broadly espoused concept of diversity emphasizes difference. Even our Prime Minister, who speaks proudly of Canada’s diversity, might be seen as struggling with how to apply the concept, reflected in this Globe & Mail opinion piece (looking beyond the specific content, it begs the question of who decides what is, or is not, included in our view of diversity?). Could this emphasis on difference – between various publics and counterpublics – be helping to make needed and important headway for equality and social justice, while simultaneously creating deeper divides between peoples? Are the affordances of the internet, for the purposes of the public sphere(s), inadvertently contributing to the deepening polarization and entrenchment we are witnessing today? Where is the conversation around our sameness? Where does the recognition of our “equal humanity” occur?
To close, French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin speaks to this complexity:
‘Til next week,
DLM
P.S. In case you missed the link above, here is this week’s musical reflection.