Political correctness.
One strong implication of this discussion is that bickering over political correctness isn't a social media phenomenon at all.
I would say that 9/11 interrupted the first wave of political correctness for about 5-7 years. The 1990s were full of some oddly different anxieties from our own, but also some that were quite similar. And left and right occupied similar positions about these anxieties. Perhaps there was less penetration of ideas from the academy into mainstream media, but that's harder to say.
During the immediate post-9/11 era PC anxieties were set aside, because it really felt like we were at war. This is a thing that many young people alive today do not remember or never experienced. Being alive in 2002 was absolutely terrifying, and worrying about gendered pronouns or table displays featuring cotton seemed... impolite, almost. And certainly trivial.
The takeaway here is that NO, political correctness is not a social media phenomenon. It was already well underway in the 90s; it was briefly interrupted; and now it's back. Structural causes, if they exist, began probably sometime in the late 1980s to early 1990s. We should look there and give the question further thought. I don't have a ready answer.
I think the implementation of #Orwellian #WrongSpeak has been in the works since the #SocialMarxists plotted subversion at the Frankfurt Institute. If you can control a people's language; then you will control their thoughts.
Only we who learn the histories and parse words can see past the manipulation.
Sounds like Jordan Peterson rhetoric.
Well said honeybee, there's no legal consequence (at least in Canada) for calling someone the N-word but there is certainly a social consequence as there should be. Hate speech is well defined in the laws, particularly to inciting violence or plotting genocide.
Well said, I remember the same hype around it late 90's... especially during the AOL days.
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