Has social media made us super-sensitive? In the past couple of weeks, stories from Azealia Banks’ Twitter tirade against Zayn Malik, to a new Instagram post by Calvin Klein, to a US weather girl being asked to ‘cover-up’ live on air, have sparked controversy among social users.
Even more recently we’ve seen much of the social media sphere erupt in anger after Blake Lively posted an Instagram picture featuring a quote in the description from Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back – the quote itself is “L.A. face with an Oakland booty”.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFhx9lGR4Jj/?taken-by=blakelively&hl=en
Are people right to be offended by these types of stories (and therefore right to Tweet about it), or do we need to hit the social media chill button?
” I personally consider that online media “steals” my time with these topics by accelerating the filter-bubble” …
It could be “just” a social media bomb; but as social media becomes the origin or the catalyst of pop culture, these stories are no longer random. They actually tell a lot about who we are, and what becomes “important” or not.
What I find especially annoying is not necessarily the topics of these “social affairs” but the way online media process them and uses them as clickbait. As they all re-publish, re-post, re-interpret these mini-stories, they tend to accelerate / deepen the binary reactions: like or dislike, support or contest, positive vs negative. It is a terrible missed opportunity to make sense of the topics and to bring a more journalistic value. As we – users – have a limited attention span in social media, I personally consider that online media “steals” my time with these topics by accelerating the filter-bubble. “Yes but it’s what people want”. That’s extremely limitative: when an intelligent topic or real investigations are done, “people” know how to share the stories they believe in.
The consequence is twice worse:
- Stealing attention of people for love-hate topics hide more important topics
- Endeavouring these love-hate stories (or shall we say spins?) have real consequences in real life: watching on BBC yesterday Dan Murdoch “Black Powers: America’s Armed Resistance” (the second episode after a first film about KKK), I’ve learnt that KKK “klans” were back on the rise for the very first time this year. And the media treatment of US national and local in social media is highly responsible for this sad success
“What happened with Social Media has not changed our sensitivity, but it’s involved all of us in a global conversation” …
Has social media made us over-sensitive? I don’t think that’s the case. Did it give a platform to everyone – including the people who should never be allowed to voice their uneducated opinion? (un)fortunately, yes. The whole ‘Buzzfeed culture’ – a safe haven for avocado-loving Tumblr feminists and online crusaders, is nothing new. People have always been offended by everything. Indie magazines have thrived on it for decades. With the rise of the Web 2.0, the same people were given a loud voice, and a keyboard-shield to hide behind. Everyone is suddenly very opinionated and well informed when all the info you need is just a Google search away.
What happened with Social Media has not changed our sensitivity, but it’s involved all of us in a global conversation. And there is only one modus operandi to discuss a topic on a global scale: dumb it down. Once that happens – pronto! Blake Lively is a big racist, the Kardashians are cultural appropriators, TV shows have an agenda against lesbians and a new sexual orientation is born every fortnight.
Social media hasn’t made us oversensitive; it only reminded us how the majority of the people on this planet are not that bright.
That said, Azealia Banks is to my mind just a delusional, hateful troll.
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