No Safe Spaces For Echo Chambers

“So the election,” my openly conservative professor remarked during class, “Did all of your friends go to their safe spaces and participate in their protests? They’re totally wasting their time, by the way. Thank God USC isn’t like one of those schools, I can’t stand it.”

I had to take a few deep breaths.

My community involvement often places me in touch with ethnic and activist communities,  and so I hear the word “safe space” get thrown around a lot, usually when addressing topics that could be “triggering” to certain people. The base idea of having a safe space is for someone to be able to voice their opinions, find comfort and support and rest from triggering environments that could take a toll on a person’s mental health.

As a women of color who is a friend to members of various marginalized groups, I absolutely believe that safe spaces ought to exist. They are places where people find support they wouldn’t find anywhere else, support might be vital to a person’s well-being. At the same time, my views on safe spaces come with an asterisk.

And that asterisk is that for the sake of having open discussions across the political spectrum, the protection of safe spaces cannot be taken too far. Last year student reporter Tim Tai at the University of Missouri was harrassed by protesters who were calling for the resignation of now former President Timothy M. Wolfe. To them, having a member of the press record photographs of where they set their base camps was a violation of their safe space, since to them “it’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces." 

But the fact that the reporter was also a person of color didn't matter as activists yelled and physically pushed him in his attempt to do his job.

Just a few months before the incident, President Obama already put his two cents on college safe spaces:

I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either.

I'm inclined to disagree that the true point of safe spaces is to coddle people, but I do agree with Obama in the sense that people need to learn from each other through debate and open conversation. But perhaps that one extreme incident at Mizzou was a taste of the political polizarization and close-mindedness often seen in this election. Zealous people who take safe spaces to the extreme are dangerous because they encourage an environment that causes people to be rooted in their opinions. In the end, they will not bother to listen to differing opinions.

As author and Youtuber John Green said in a video after the election results, "I'm sorry that we've let our echo chambers become so sealed off that it is as unfathomable to me why someone would support Donald Trump for president as it is for many Trump supporters why I would support Hillary Clinton."

As members of marginalized groups reach out to their safe spaces in light of Trump’s presidency to mourn and to figure out how to cope with the future it is important that people don’t get too preoccupied with only people who reaffirm their viewpoints.

In order to prevent Trump’s administration and the upcoming Congress from setting the country back 50 years, people NEED to be able to talk to people with other viewpoints and be willing to acknowledge one’s biases and even flaws in their own arguments. As I scrolled through my feeds post-election, my heart hurt for people whom I felt have more to fear from a Trump presidency than I do right now. At the same time, I also felt fear reading posts from friends who refuse to have any association with a Trump supporter “because you clearly have no regard for my well-being and for the issues I stand for.”

There is a time and place for support, but it’s important to remember that echo chambers go both ways. The election reavealed that the country is politically polarized enough. Safe spaces should not be a safe space for close-mindedness.

Eulogy For The 2016 Election Coverage

As the country erupts in Internet flame wars (and sometimes actual flames on a pinata), people wait in dread as the day to Donald Trump’s inauguration counts down. But as mainstream news organizations use new storytelling techniques to cover the aftermath of the election--such as using Facebook Live to stream protest rallies and marches--this writer cannot help but mourn the election results for another reason.

Trump’s election indicates that the mainstream media lost much of its sway over the public.

Many of the major outlets endorsed Clinton which may have been proof to Trump supporters that the mainstream was inherently against their candidate, which doesn’t help when nearly every other headline mentions something about Trump and his supporters to the point where the public is desensitized. In this regard, the best aspect of the Internet is also its most crippling fault, that thing being the wealth of information available. 

It’s in a society’s best interest, after all, to have a marketplace of ideas. By encouraging a mass exchange of different information, opinion and arguments, the best ideas can shine through to guide decision-making that ranges from whom to put on the school board to whether the country should take military action. 

But as the country becomes more politically polarized, yet politically desensitized, the media and commentators struggled between objectively informing the country as per journalistic duty but also emphasizing the dangers of a Trump administration. Seeing how much effort the media put towards running negative headlines about Trump from the mid-primaries onward, it’s frightening how little impact it now seems to have had over those who voted for Trump.

At the same time, it can be difficult to persuade a person to overcome certain judgments and fears, to the point where one’s logic and reasoning is more often used to confirm biases rather than actively looking for evidence contradicting a person’s initial beliefs. A person, therefore, can claim to have spent hours researching and reading information on the Internet, but it’s not any good if the person is only receiving information from one source, or from a few sources that politically lean a certain way.

The danger of the Internet is that in the modern marketplace of ideas, social media feeds and selective Google searches make it easier for a person to receive information that leans one way or another. We are living in an era where a person’s media literacy is great if they receive news from a liberal outlet and a conservative outlet, let alone actively trying to critically and objectively analyze the messages of either one. This era of weakened trust in mainstream outlets and in poor media literacy is troubling considering that Balkan teenagers can run pro-Trump websites full of inaccurate or misleading information that nevertheless generates hundreds of thousands of engagements on social media.

As the country protests and braces itself for a Trump presidency, so too should mainstream media. Not only has the election highlighted the people’s distrust, but also shown that a polarized electorate is steadfast to sources that align with their own biases, regardless of reliability. The fourth estate is meant to be an institution that stands between politicians and the greater interest of the public. But as we watch live-streams of protests around the country, however, we witness what happens when the fourth estate fails to engage the majority of the electorate.