Back almost 30 years ago at the start of the internet age, an old back injury had flared up and I was scheduled for surgery. I went on the internet to see what results were achieved. I wanted to know about what post op was about. Whoa Baby!!!! What I found made me rethink surgery. Then I realized that folks with good results had no reason to comment and folks with bad results had a world of reasons to complain.
As someone who often thinks reflexively negatively, lately I've felt it beneficial to counter such feelings with intention. I rarely have enough confidence in my words to say anything online, so I can't speak for myself on how this applies fully to what you're describing. But I think perhaps intrinsically positive people might be just as unhinged as the negative ones, and it's a shame they're feeling crowded out enough to stay quiet. These days I greatly appreciate someone letting out unhinged positivity into the void, haters be damned !!
Thanks for linking my article! I haven’t been ripped to shreds yet, so maybe social media is losing its teeth. And although I don’t have the nerves or the energy to wade into the most heated political and cultural fights, popping up once in a while to say, “hey, things are pretty good!” may be doable. As you said, the positive responses far outweigh the negative.
Even when saying positive things doesn't lead to a flood of online abuse, it does tend to run into a wall of disbelief. I've encountered this with friends. I can lay out evidence for why, in fact, things are not all going to hell, but they just move the goalposts and now I have to go find evidence to disprove new claims. It's exhausting and demoralizing, so what's the point?
Nice piece. My feeling is that the negative discourse problem is somewhat structural, and as we move from public central platforms a la ex-Twitter to smaller group discussions there is space for things to become more positive and (relatedly) less performative
Well, there is the complicated aspect of this that you're also engaging in a negative discourse in some sense by saying "Things were worse at some specific point in the past, in reference to the specific conditions/issues being discussed now". That is generally easier to do because the set of people who are positioned to evaluate your claim experientially is much smaller, and the people who have any interest in doing so against more demanding evidentiary standard are even smaller.
For the most part, those kinds of claims are accepted (and not seen as negative) when they align with certain general conceptions of progress. If I say, "When I first arrived at Swarthmore, it was less welcoming to faculty of color, to GLTB faculty, and more more conventionally male-dominated", most of my colleagues will accept that as true, even if they have complaints on those grounds right now.
If, on the other hand, I say "We were paid worse in real dollar terms and our benefits were worse", I might have to get specific and have some evidence. I could make that statement hold if I concentrated on very particular aspects of our compensation--our starting salaries are better than they were, and everybody who asks for a startup fund gets it, for example. I could also make it hold if I took a really long-run view, e.g., before the endowment provided big revenues and before the big tuition hikes of the 1970s and 1980s, faculty were in real money terms paid worse. But I think when you say "In the past, we were paid worse", nobody in 2024 thinks you're referencing 1955, since there's nobody in the room who was on the faculty at that time. (There's some old faculty but not that old.)
Which then I think goes to the question of whether or when people are open to anodyne or positive remarks: it's a question of what the intent of the remark actually is. If there were a group of newly tenured associates upset with compensation, and I reply "Well, actually back in 1996 in relative dollar terms the newly tenured associates were paid worse, you should be happy", I shouldn't be surprised if that draws a hostile reaction. I can't just say "I'm just such a positive guy", because my intent (or my impact) in saying that is not especially positive. If I said, "Ok, but let's not forget that our start-up funding is so much better now", that's different--I'm underscoring the positive things without trying to repudiate what they have to say.
On a very meta level, I always find your contributions to these kinds of discussions fascinating, because it often feels like you have a fairly specific scenario and possibly specific people in mind that it would be inappropriate to discuss in detail. In the same way that I often do when I'm writing these things.
As far as a response to the detailed points in your comment, I don't exactly agree, but explaining how and why would skate very close to things that would be inappropriate to discuss in more detail. So.,..
One thing I get from reading academic blogs and from reading social media where faculty participate (even places like Reddit where some of the people claiming to be faculty aren't) along with doing a lot of external reviews is the chance to 'abstract' the situations I've personally witnessed close to home (not just Swarthmore but other Philly-area schools) so that I can work from experience without being confined to it. But yeah, sometimes I've got something less abstract in mind--the point about start-up costs is something we talked about here this year, for example.
Back almost 30 years ago at the start of the internet age, an old back injury had flared up and I was scheduled for surgery. I went on the internet to see what results were achieved. I wanted to know about what post op was about. Whoa Baby!!!! What I found made me rethink surgery. Then I realized that folks with good results had no reason to comment and folks with bad results had a world of reasons to complain.
One thing I'd say is inoculate any positive take with a real (not just a perfunctory) nod to where and how things coud be even more positive.
As someone who often thinks reflexively negatively, lately I've felt it beneficial to counter such feelings with intention. I rarely have enough confidence in my words to say anything online, so I can't speak for myself on how this applies fully to what you're describing. But I think perhaps intrinsically positive people might be just as unhinged as the negative ones, and it's a shame they're feeling crowded out enough to stay quiet. These days I greatly appreciate someone letting out unhinged positivity into the void, haters be damned !!
Thanks for linking my article! I haven’t been ripped to shreds yet, so maybe social media is losing its teeth. And although I don’t have the nerves or the energy to wade into the most heated political and cultural fights, popping up once in a while to say, “hey, things are pretty good!” may be doable. As you said, the positive responses far outweigh the negative.
Even when saying positive things doesn't lead to a flood of online abuse, it does tend to run into a wall of disbelief. I've encountered this with friends. I can lay out evidence for why, in fact, things are not all going to hell, but they just move the goalposts and now I have to go find evidence to disprove new claims. It's exhausting and demoralizing, so what's the point?
Nice piece. My feeling is that the negative discourse problem is somewhat structural, and as we move from public central platforms a la ex-Twitter to smaller group discussions there is space for things to become more positive and (relatedly) less performative
Well, there is the complicated aspect of this that you're also engaging in a negative discourse in some sense by saying "Things were worse at some specific point in the past, in reference to the specific conditions/issues being discussed now". That is generally easier to do because the set of people who are positioned to evaluate your claim experientially is much smaller, and the people who have any interest in doing so against more demanding evidentiary standard are even smaller.
For the most part, those kinds of claims are accepted (and not seen as negative) when they align with certain general conceptions of progress. If I say, "When I first arrived at Swarthmore, it was less welcoming to faculty of color, to GLTB faculty, and more more conventionally male-dominated", most of my colleagues will accept that as true, even if they have complaints on those grounds right now.
If, on the other hand, I say "We were paid worse in real dollar terms and our benefits were worse", I might have to get specific and have some evidence. I could make that statement hold if I concentrated on very particular aspects of our compensation--our starting salaries are better than they were, and everybody who asks for a startup fund gets it, for example. I could also make it hold if I took a really long-run view, e.g., before the endowment provided big revenues and before the big tuition hikes of the 1970s and 1980s, faculty were in real money terms paid worse. But I think when you say "In the past, we were paid worse", nobody in 2024 thinks you're referencing 1955, since there's nobody in the room who was on the faculty at that time. (There's some old faculty but not that old.)
Which then I think goes to the question of whether or when people are open to anodyne or positive remarks: it's a question of what the intent of the remark actually is. If there were a group of newly tenured associates upset with compensation, and I reply "Well, actually back in 1996 in relative dollar terms the newly tenured associates were paid worse, you should be happy", I shouldn't be surprised if that draws a hostile reaction. I can't just say "I'm just such a positive guy", because my intent (or my impact) in saying that is not especially positive. If I said, "Ok, but let's not forget that our start-up funding is so much better now", that's different--I'm underscoring the positive things without trying to repudiate what they have to say.
On a very meta level, I always find your contributions to these kinds of discussions fascinating, because it often feels like you have a fairly specific scenario and possibly specific people in mind that it would be inappropriate to discuss in detail. In the same way that I often do when I'm writing these things.
As far as a response to the detailed points in your comment, I don't exactly agree, but explaining how and why would skate very close to things that would be inappropriate to discuss in more detail. So.,..
One thing I get from reading academic blogs and from reading social media where faculty participate (even places like Reddit where some of the people claiming to be faculty aren't) along with doing a lot of external reviews is the chance to 'abstract' the situations I've personally witnessed close to home (not just Swarthmore but other Philly-area schools) so that I can work from experience without being confined to it. But yeah, sometimes I've got something less abstract in mind--the point about start-up costs is something we talked about here this year, for example.