Post #3: Values of Free Expression

     Out of the eight values of free expression, the one that resonated with me the most was the third one: Stable Change. Stable change is the idea that if people in a society are able to "vent" or speak their minds when they feel angry or alienated, society is more stable as those people will be less likely to resort to violence.

    The main part of Stable Change that resonates with me is the "venting" idea as it relates to video games. Many games, mainly competitive games tend to make people angry, including myself as it's almost unavoidable with the way these kinds of games are designed. They reward you for winning and punish you for losing, and to keep people playing for as long as possible, these competitive games will actually rig the odds against you to force you to lose sometimes. Due to so many games being designed like this, it's important for players to be able to vent their frustrations towards various things such as the game itself or the random teammates they get paired up with to avoid getting too mad. Even outside of games, I find venting whenever I'm mad to be very helpful for calming down.

    Social media sites are often filled with people venting about all sorts of things on a daily basis. Take Twitter for example. More often than not, you can't scroll for more than five seconds without seeing someone complaining about something. In the case of social media, it's hard to tell if the venting done on them actually makes people less likely to do anything violent, especially since people still can act violently on social media such as by threatening others.

    Perhaps you could also see protests as a form of venting. Peaceful protests are basically large groups of people choosing to vent their frustrations to create change instead of acting violently to do so. In this way, peaceful protests perfectly encapsulate the idea of Stable Change. Of course, the opposite is true for violent protests which completely go against the idea. Peaceful protests can take many different forms such as an employment strike for better pay or working conditions or a group of people refusing to purchase a product due to being against an action that the producer of the product had done.