I always thought trigger warnings came from tumblr, one of a number of ideas cooked up by teenagers trying to reinvent existing things from scratch. It's just content warnings, which have obviously been around a lot longer, but framed around trauma triggers. So like, making something that's useful for everyone out to be an accessibility tool, which opens it up to a bunch of criticism and debate that was never applicable before. It would never have been a "culture war" issue if those kids hadn't needlessly rebranded and moralized the basic act of warning about possibly objectionable material.
So what’s the deal with trigger warnings? Do they actually help? They clear are a culture war fixture. But where do they come from and is there any scientific evidence behind them?
Because they first got public attention at liberal arts universities in the US I assumed that it was the popularization of academic research. That’s not actually what happened. It was students who pressured schools to adopt them. Where did the students learn about trigger warnings? Early social media! LiveJournal, Tumblr, and most especially fanfic sites had trigger and content warnings on their content and lots of students had used those sites in high school and liked the idea of trigger warnings.
Search Engine is a great podcast, and they did an episode about the origins of trigger warnings.
https://www.searchengine.show/listen/search-engine-1/what-do-trigger-warnings-actually-do
Discussion
No replies yet.