One of the feeds I track on my home page is Wil Wheaton’s blog. Recently he put up a fairly long post following up on an essay he wrote for Salon about Christmas dinner with his parents. A political discussion turned emotional, and when Wil wrote about it, his parents thought he was being unfair, so he tried to set the record straight. I read the post on Wil’s site, and then noticed that he had cross-posted it as a diary at Daily Kos. It’s kind of fascinating to see the difference in the comments sections. At Wil’s site, the focus tends to be on the emotional content, talking to Wil about the pain he clearly felt, the mistake he felt he had made, and the effort he was making to atone. Since Wil’s readership includes some conservatives who disagree with his politics, there’s also a certain amount of effort to continue the “let’s try to understand each other” theme of the followup post, and a few posts that try to engage the political debate. Over at dKos, it’s a much more charged and partisan atmosphere, which includes some posters criticizing Wil for backing down from his parents and letting himself be emotionally manipulated and others telling Wil that regardless of his protests to the contrary, his father is, in fact, a wingnut.
Some of this is no doubt tied to the different natures of the two communities. One is a personal community built around fans of Wil Wheaton. The other is a community of charged partisans. But that provides an example of how the contexts that we put ourselves in can shape the perceptions that we form and the responses we make. Which suggests that we should not get so commited to them that we react with anger and vitriol when we’re faced with disagreement.
But then again, I don’t want to seem like I’m being so wishy-washy that I don’t think there’s ever such a thing as being right in a discussion. There’s a certain amount of intellectual gymnastics you have to go through in order to simultaneously hold a position and try and convince someone else it’s the right one while you also leave yourself open to being convinced to go the other way. From time to time the effort makes me a little dizzy, but I believe it’s worth it.