Not Guilty

Social media gets blamed for just about any problem imaginable, and while social media is certainly not innocent of many of the accusations, rare is the issue that was introduced by social media. The overarching contribution of social media is really that the new medium catalyzes and exacerbates existing ones. It is bad that children are bullied by their peers at school--"cyber-bullying" is the extension of the hours of the day during which they're susceptible to such treatment. The reference group to which people critically compare themselves is no longer constrained geographically, nor by just the countable occurrences of celebrities appearing in print magazines--the effective group against which to feel inferior is much larger (explained by the Big-fish-little-pond effect). The platform itself does not instigate the problems--the problems are either systemic, prevalent above and before it, or else interpersonal and deriving from human psychology. The projection of these problems on the context or platform is like blaming the asphalt roads themselves for the huge number of deaths that take place upon them.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 1, 2020 at 10:14 PM

    I like your comparison at the end with blaming the asphalt roads for the number of deaths that take place upon them. Yes, social media can cause cyberbullying but it is not the sole-cause of it. There are underlying factors that play into it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

It is absurd that replicating an idea or performance can be litigated against . The rationale for intellectual rights certainly does not hold up universally to reason, indicating it does not succeed in protecting something of inherent value without also producing at least some harm. Suppose that the first person to walk upright had claimed that action to be a novel and creative feat, and forbade anyone to mimic their style--with only the exception of this first-doer , or so-called "artist," the entire human race would be reduced to crawling (assuming  that was not also copyrighted). This imposes severe restrictions on human attainment, and more importantly their wellbeing. The rationale behind intellectual property is that it incentivizes innovation within a capitalist system, to justify the overhead cost in speculative research and development. In truth the necessity for such laws indicates a severe shortcoming of capitalism . The initiative to innovate is not naturally ac...
Read more

How the Sausage Gets Made

Cancel Culture is the manifestation of a revolution currently under way!  Essentially the domination of one sentiment over the other, at large scale and with unsettling instances of collateral damage , it is exactly what one might expect to occur if a social revolution was enabled by modern technology . The digital aspects particular to this  revolution aside, the essence of the phenomenon has analogues in history: during the American Revolution, the sentiment that was silenced was British sympathy-- not all colonials were supportive of the push for independence, and expressing that sentiment exposed oneself to serious harm. For the sake of self-preservation, non-sympathizers find themselves trying to not get trampled. Revolutions are characteristically messy, the very best causes will still make one's stomach churn when looking too closely. Even where a revolution is necessary to right horrendous systemic problems, my heart goes out to the ones so unlucky as to be "tied up ...
Read more

A Petty Problem

One would think that there existed a topic out there in the world which was so inconsequential that people would not even bother expending energy to come to a resolution over it--some disagreement whose subject just plain does not matter . If this were the case, then we could prioritize issues whose resolution makes real improvements to society. Unfortunately even the silliest distinctions seem to provoke heated discussion around them to justify one side and fault the other. The significance of the smallest sentiments is regularly inflated, even to the suggestion that normative ethics could be derived from the smallest issue. For example, elaborate sketches can be designed to denigrate entire generations  over a distinction in just vernacular, as if during this  two minutes, fifty-seven seconds  one imagines that the only thing that mattered in the world was the inflection one used during conversation; and countless programming convention standards will tirelessly war ov...
Read more