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The Break-Up of the Overton Window
Social media and news organizations’ political polarization is impacting our capacity to foster discourse.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter followed by Trump’s reelection have marked a significant shift to the right in the socio-political landscape.
Most companies have scrapped their DEI policies and reverted back to performance-based hiring, and a range of opinions that were once un-politically correct to state have popped up without cancellation, a phenomenon known as the opening of the Overton Window.
This has led many to prophetize that the mainstream media were going to align on the new brutal and hyper-realistic style conservatives are now discussing issues for too long ignored or diminished due to their sensible character.
But this impression is just that — an impression that mistakes the development of a narrative within a restrained digital environment for the broad narrative the common citizen lives by.
The media landscape changed a lot since Joseph Overton came up with the Window concept in the mid-1990s.
