The Culture of Shut Up - Jon Lovett - The Atlantic:
I don’t want those voices [of old media gatekeepers] to drown out the diverse and compelling
voices that now have a better chance of making it in front of us than
ever before—even as we still have a ways to go. And what I think we have
to do, then, to protect this new wonderful thing of ‘a good idea can
come from anyone anywhere’—is we need to stop telling each other to shut
up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to
shut up. You aren’t going to shut up. I’m not going to shut up. The
idiots aren’t going to shut up.
We need to learn to live with the noise and tolerate the noise even
when the noise is stupid, even when the noise is offensive, even when
the noise is at times dangerous. Because no matter how noble the intent,
it’s a demand for conformity that encourages people on all sides of a
debate to police each other instead of argue and convince each other.
And, ultimately, the cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and
boycott, will leave us with fewer and fewer people talking more and more
about less and less.
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