Social media + politics
How we currently live in a world of tweeting from the toilet, and keyboard warriors
This semester, I spend a lot of time reading about the history of the internet. I blame NYU’s Studio 20 required “Digital Thinking” course, aka “History of the Internet / Media’s Transition to Digital” feat. Jay Rosen.
It’s in this class we started off studying how news organizations like the Guardian went digital, through reading Alan Rusbridger’s book,Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now.The book chronicles the years up into the digitization of the news — and the media industry from about 1994-2015, which, if you ask anyone remotely familiar with the American Political System, well, some big shit happened.
And for some reason, we all can’t figure out a way to talk civilly about it on the internet. Conversations about politics are quick to be argumentative or finger pointing, rather than solving the problem.
This is so much of a thing, I penned a really long blog post about it as my daily writing yesterday (see below).
On elected officials on social media + a digitally influenced political world
Twitter and social media as a whole have had a unique presence in the past major election cycle and even continue to do so now. With the second president to exist on social media while in office and probably tweeting from the toilet as we speak, along with the resignation of Representative Katie Hill over cyber exploitation and revenge porn, we’re in a time that has no political precedent. I mean, there’s been scandals in the past, affairs, and the whole Nixon presidency thing — but nothing accelerated by the digital era, or nothing as combative as Trump and the free press.
My take? If you’re annoyed with politics and political discussion on your social media timeline - you’re privileged in some sort. It either:
doesn’t directly impact you
you’re not aware of how it impacts you
apathetic towards a flawed system
Which I recognize how it may come across as fighting words - but that is not my intention at all. We’re all too quick to have an opinion on things that don’t affect us or that we haven’t researched. And that’s probably the biggest issue I see with digital media and politics in this day and age.
Read the full blog post HERE and agree with me, or don’t —but let’s have a conversation about it.
How to handle ‘Keyboard Warriors’
Just don’t. If you struggle addressing a comment to someone’s face, is it a comment that needs to be voiced online? In an article published in Adweek, writer Amy Summers compares them akin to flirty boys":
“The same goes for flirty boys who text message you fifty times a day, but when you pass them in the street they can’t even manage a hello. … What do you think I’m going to do? Bite your head off, or worse, not say hello back? Oh, the humiliation.”
Quick Links
This may have not had the same sort of ‘lighthearted’ tone as previous newsletters - but that’s okay. I think these are all issues worth broadcasting to on my little corner of the internet.
Needless to say, here’s some fun links about cool things circling around the internet I found:
The internet is 50 years old, read the history of ARPANET here.
What startups are doing in the wake of California’s wildfires.
The New York City Marathon happened, and watching people do hard things is always inspiring to me. But if you don’t like running: here’s some things that take longer than some dude running 26.2 miles.
Cinderblock the cat started walking - which is a tweet that deserves an embed:
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Until next time my friends 👋