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Apr 18, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse

I’m in a group chat with four other guys, we used to all ski and snowboard together and occasionally do mountain bike trips, two of them are Trump voters, one voted Biden, one is is a trust fund baby and never really talks politics and me. A Bernie guy that voted Green Party in 2020. We talk crap about politics, we also talk crap about cars and bikes and pretty much anything else we can think to talk crap about. Thing is we know each other in real life, at some point we’ve all been dug out of tree well by someone else in the group, we’ve all been through the loss of a beloved pet together, a few divorces, a couple marriages that should have ended in divorces. In other words we know people beyond their political opinions. This focus group seems like guys that don’t have that kind of relationship with anyone and fill in all the blanks based on whether they’re anti-trans or some other short hand for filling in a lot of blanks. Social media probably does make people hate each other but it’s mostly because they don’t bother to get to know people outside of social media or beyond the narrow reasons that brought them together in the first place.

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I guess it’s a little sad I haven’t cultivated a readership because I was saying the exact same thing about group chats 6 months ago. People are going to find a way to discuss what needs to be said and one thing that’s extremely important about these chats is that they are semi-anonymous. You may know a few people in them personally but many that I belong to are full of people with a few shared interests, who chat directly in Signal or Zoom and have way more freedom to say things to each other than they do to their IRL friends and family. The conversations are deeper, more civilized and more direct than the crap chat groups I share with my older friends and even my ex-band mates.

I think that’s a very important and overlooked factor: real people, you know their names and faces but not much else and you speak with civility which allows you to access vulnerabilities and dangerous topics.

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