Another Angry WomanI often use my dad, a man who buys the Times every day, as a barometer of how well the culture war lines are landing with the average reader, and I am thrilled to report that despite years of hysterical fascist articles, he still literally hasn't noticed any of it because he just skims past anything which seems aggro about nothing.
It's not just that he's turned off by it but vaguely aware that there is Discourse. He is entirely oblivious to the culture war hot button topics like GRA reform, no platform, etc. He has never heard of the word "woke". And this is a man who buys the Times every single day. He's just flicking to the bits that interest him (the word puzzle, the business pages and "what have those twats in Westminster done now")
Just about the only weird talking point he seems to have picked up from his newspaper-reading habits is that he spent a few months in 2020 convinced that Rishi Sunak was a socialist. Otherwise, my dad is a pretty normal guy.
There are repeated polls, over years, which show that public opinion on culture war topics hasn't really shifted despite a prolonged assault from legacy media, especially the Times. The majority of people are still broadly supportive of trans people. The general, reasonable person on the street literally doesn't even know what "snowflake" means. The prevailing social attitude remains "live and let live, I guess, it takes all sorts to make a world."
I wonder what a post-outrage clicks media economy will look like. Where they just howl hate into a void because at the end of the day 90% of it is some bigot farting on about something that literally nobody else cares about. Will they stop, without getting the attention they crave? I suspect they probably will, because it really does feel like attention-seeking behaviour.
quay