Social psychologists must be having "fun"
Saturday, 28 September 2019 14:21![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yvannairieSomething I was talking about with hellofriendsiminthedark made me think about I really don't have the language to describe some of the processes I see online, where someone is exposed to traumatising and distressing material on the internet and starts acting out in an effort to make themselves feel safe again, often exacerbated by an unsupportive environment, and then gets dragged into the orbit of someone charismatic and awful.
Like, how do you talk about someone like that? They're not necessarily radicalised, because their need for control often ends up wholly internalised, and you can't call them abuse victims because the "abusive relationship" was parasocial and often wholly one-sided in practice.
How do we talk about someone who's a survivor of an internet cult where the algorithm and an unwitting filter bubble was the key component of the social isolation? How do you talk about emotional abuse when the abusive element is decentralised into a mob?
hellofriendsiminthedark made me think about I really don't have the language to describe some of the processes I see online, where someone is exposed to traumatising and distressing material on the internet and starts acting out in an effort to make themselves feel safe again, often exacerbated by an unsupportive environment, and then gets dragged into the orbit of someone charismatic and awful.Like, how do you talk about someone like that? They're not necessarily radicalised, because their need for control often ends up wholly internalised, and you can't call them abuse victims because the "abusive relationship" was parasocial and often wholly one-sided in practice.
How do we talk about someone who's a survivor of an internet cult where the algorithm and an unwitting filter bubble was the key component of the social isolation? How do you talk about emotional abuse when the abusive element is decentralised into a mob?
