Should People Be Allowed to Like Things?

Are We Discoursing Ourselves to Death? And Other Inquiries

A seventeenth-century depiction of a coffee house in London. Photo from Epoch Times

In 2023, a common Twitter user is not unlike a soapbox speaker in the early twentieth century. Back then, voicing your opinion was as easy as standing on a box in a town square or street curb and projecting. This procedure, while seemingly straightforward, wasn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds, given people’s inequitable access to public space, social marginalization, stage fright, and the like. Today, the anonymity offered by social media platforms like Twitter makes self-expression even easier. Users can express all they want, articulating the overrated nature of a popular actress, rallying around a social cause, and promoting their Substack articles in the same breath, all without disclosing their personal identity. 

In 1964, Peter Hohendahl and Patricia Russian described Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere as “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed.” Individuals can meet in public spaces to freely discuss societal problems and engage in productive debate regarding matters of a society within a state. In Habermas’ eyes, the public sphere was best exemplified by coffee houses that abounded in London in 1680-1730, as they were accessible, informal public meeting places where “discourse” could be engaged with. “Discourse,” in this case, refers to discussion and debate on a particular topic (political discourse, cultural discourse, etc.).

While Habermas and his cohorts saw discourse within the public sphere as a conduit for political action, others saw it as exclusionary. Particularly within coffee houses of the seventeenth century, not everyone was permitted access to this supposedly “public” forum. Others, including feminist critic Nancy Fraser, saw the public sphere as precisely what it contains: talk. More specifically, as a “theatre in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk.” 

This take, believe it or not, was given before the birth of social media.

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I was driven to write about the state of online discourse after seeing several online personalities I follow get criticized for expressing their opinions on things. Specifically, video creator Mina Le made a video giving her take on the new Netflix series Wednesday. Based on the video’s title and thumbnail (she refers to the show as “meh”), her review wasn’t particularly savory. One Twitter user posted a screenshot of the video’s thumbnail alongside the caption “everytime she’s on my fyp she’s always complaining about something,” referring to Mina’s many videos critiquing various cultural trends and pieces of media. Some in the Twitter replies defended Mina’s right to critique, while others complained about how everything these days must get turned into “discourse.”

Screenshot of the tweet in question

As with many concepts, the internet has sunk its claws deep into “discourse.” In doing so, “discourse” has become a rather distorted concept, now containing the buzzword qualities similarly injected into phenomena like “gaslighting” and “gatekeeping” (more on that in this article from

charlie squire

). It’s thrown around with abandon, referring to online discussions of anything from police brutality, to movie plots, to whether or not we like the shape of a celebrity’s eyebrows. The term isn’t necessarily being misused, rather the potential subjects for discourse - those in the sphere of legitimate debate - continue to expand. Scrolling through a typical Gen Z timeline, you’ll find the global wealth gap being critiqued alongside tweets of people discussing whether an artist’s sophomore album is better than their first.

This distortion has occurred, in part, because of shifts in rhetorical meaning, as well as the flattening of “action” in the twenty-first century, in terms of political action, but also all kinds of action. This is a concept that Jia Tolentino expands on extensively in her essay “The I in the Internet.” Offline, there is a myriad of actions humans can perform. We can walk around our neighborhoods and engage in discussion with friends or physically organize against systemic injustice or purchase goods from small businesses or read a book in a park. There are levels to the ways in which we can live. 

Online, all action is reduced to essentially the same action: clicking icons on a screen. To walk around a neighborhood is to like and comment on a person’s post. To organize is to repost or share a link or hashtag. To purchase goods is to click “add to cart.” To read a book is to share a photo of yourself reading a book. There were many nights during middle school and high school, in which the primary activity my friends and I would do at a sleepover was sit on social media, scrolling in unison in our respective sleeping bags. Even today, to know someone is to follow them. There are people I follow on social media whom I haven’t spoken to in years (if ever!) whose life details I know more fully than the people that live in the same apartment building as me.

Social media does have redemptive qualities when it comes to communication. For instance, those who may have been excluded from mainstream, offline public spheres in the past have the ability to more actively insert themselves into conversations and create counterpublics on social platforms. We also have the ability to connect with like-minded individuals on a global scale (even if that means getting siloed off into echo chambers).

At the same time, social media is being used as a one-stop-shop for relational maintenance, personal branding, political action, and self-expression. The conflation of these actions on just a handful of channels is causing a clash. One person expressing their opinion on a TV show is suddenly taken in the same vein as expressing a political stance or personal attack of sorts, as tweets containing media opinions are sat alongside tweets calling out corrupt institutions and individuals.

Aside from critiquing media from a more technical standpoint, the beauty of art is its subjective nature. Depending on one’s identity and life experiences, one piece of art may speak to them more than another person. Yet, on the internet, personal judgments are often equated with castigation.

And to make matters more complex, internet users’ identities are intertwined with the media they consume. Fan accounts abound, devoting themselves to various fictional characters, actors, singers, and more. Users will practically make their fan actions a full-time job, promoting the work of their idol through homemade video edits, merchandise, Wednesday Addams profile pictures, and the like. Devoid of offline identifying markers, internet users are what they consume. Thus, a critique of the media they love hits even closer to home than it may have offline.

The million-dollar question that seems to be popping up on my feed time and time again is simple: is anyone allowed to like anything anymore?!

To me, the answer is yes. People are allowed to enjoy the media they want, but that doesn’t mean everyone will enjoy it. It’s counterproductive when such clashes in personal opinion are viewed in the same way clashes in views on fundamental matters like human rights are. Sure, in some cases, overlap will ensue, but for the most part, mixing matters of taste and matters of ethics will just lead to a hypocritical, digital screaming match, with little ground being covered. People criticizing others for being critical.

Are we “discoursing” ourselves to death? Spending our days in an internet bubble in which all opinions on every matter are jumbled onto an infinite feed, devoid of any truly human touch, I think it’s easy to fall down an unproductive discourse rabbit hole. We forget what it means to have active, dyadic conversations. We forget what it means to view issues, particularly ones of personal taste, with complexity. We forget that we can like art (or not) and think it can be improved upon. 

What will truly save us from stumbling down said rabbit hole further isn’t discoursing even more online, but rather stepping off the internet altogether. Understanding that political action is at its most instrumental when it amounts to tangible action, as much as consciousness-raising has its benefits. Understanding that human connection is best facilitated when the “human” aspect is emphasized. And that when we have conversations that aren’t entirely facilitated between screens, many rifts in personal opinions can more likely be viewed as what they are: a natural outcome of our different social locations and human experiences that lead us to develop individualized points of view and opinions.