Audience diversity is a thing...

[anna_wing]

Much angst would be spared many people if it were only remembered that not everything is for everyone, and no-one writes for a universal audience. Complaining that, for instance, a Financial Times columnist writing about rootless expats ignores the experience of anyone who is not a rootless expat is rather beside the point.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Oh my goodness yes, yes, YES.

I think this all the time. It's a problem I see most often on Twitter, but I think it's really everywhere. Sometimes--but only sometimes--I get cross at articles that purport to be addressing a very wide spectrum of people when clearly they're only addressing a certain segment (as when, at the beginning of COVID, they advised that if you had a family member who caught it, you should isolate them in their own room, with their own bathroom ... That's not useful advice for a huge section of the population), but *more* often I see people getting het up about articles that are clearly not intending or trying to do whatever it is the reader is upset that they're not doing (e.g., if an article is about what it's like to be a Black girl in a mainly White high school, it's really kind of silly to say, "Yeah but what about Black girls who aren't in mainly White schools??" or "But what about Indigenous girls; how come you're not talking about them??" Those stories are both worth telling but are clearly not what the article is setting out to do.)

[anna_wing]

Yes, really every social media comment should be understood as "this is an expression of personal opinion, you are free to ignore it."


but *more* often I see people getting het up about articles that are clearly not intending or trying to do whatever it is the reader is upset that they're not doing

Yes, I've seen that too. Not everyone is obliged to care about everything either. Everyone has their own priorities, to which they are fully entitled, within the bounds of their local legal and social context.