you know how some parents do that toxic thing where they donât notice or reward kids for improving their behavior, but every screw-up gets remarked upon and used to inflict shame? so youâre stuck in that awful cycle where there are no rewards, only the inevitability of eventual punishment?
and how that makes it extremely hard to judge your own actions or grow into a better person, because thereâs no one to confirm that you actually are doing better, and are capable of improving, and are not doomed to forever be a terrible person incapable of growth?
ok so: I donât know how to explain to you that weâve built a social media culture that treats people the same way. with the same abusive cycle.
That sounds like cancel culture
I donât know what to call it anymore. people get heated about terms like âpurityâ or âcancelâ or âcall outâ culture, or canât seem to agree on a meaning. Iâm not talking about like. no longer supporting rich and powerful celebrities when their abusive actions come to light. Iâm not talking about holding people accountable, or warning people about active abusers. but I am seriously concerned about how we treat social media users once they get even a small amount of attention, even in small niche spaces.
I am concerned about this culture of combing through years of peopleâs social media accounts, looking for âproblematicâ shit theyâve done. I am concerned with the whole culture of using âcall outsâ as a tool to harass and ostracize users large and small. I am concerned about the malice we spread behind peopleâs backs, in screenshots and posts they arenât able to see. I am concerned with this culture of demanding apologies for things said years ago, things already outgrown and regretted, and of ignoring those apologies even while pilling on more censure. Iâm concerned about this whole culture of accusation and misinformation, where the most outrageous claims and holier-than-thou performances are rewarded with notes and views, even as facts are ignored and context removed. I am concerned about the lack of accountability, the way the accused is given no opportunity to defend themselves from the onslaught, the way their responses and explanations go ignored, the way any charge can be made at any time on any evidence, with no ability to appeal or exonerate. Iâm concerned about the way this culture targets minority users and turns their own communities against them. Iâm concerned about the actually harmful and predatory behavior that is lost in the bog, and how we have lost the ability to distinguish between shades of gray with any level of sanity. And I am concerned by the sheer number of people who fail to realize they are perpetuating bullying and harassment.
I am enormously concerned with the way people who are âcalled outâ are never forgiven, never allowed to make amends, never allowed to grow, how their efforts to learn and do better are ignored even while strangers callously repeat and reblog and retweet the same criticisms ad nauseam.
And I see this everywhere, happening to anyone. And yes, this applies to larger accounts and youtubers and âinfluencers,â and a bunch of content creators who may or may not be making a decent living off of their work, but who are certainly not ârich and powerful celebrities.â (Because apparently we spend so much time in online microcosms that yaâll canât tell the difference???) Christ, my blog isnât nearly as large as some people seem to think, itâs obscure by most measures, and still Iâve been the target of mass harassment for years. Iâve seen bad and watched others go through worse, seen users with far larger and far smaller followings driven off of this and other platformsâdriven off with a violence and bloodthirst that had nothing to do with making a community safer and everything to do with a toxic culture gone wrong. Fucking fix this already.
Abuse is still abuse when it happens online, when done by strangers, when done anonymously, when done en masse. Now do BETTER.
This post hit me in a way I wasnât expecting. I read the first paragraphs, about being raised in an environment where youâre punished for every minor transgression and never praised for anything. This is exactly the environment I was raised in, so it got me seeing parallels, and none of them were to social media.
My parallels were to all the jobs Iâve held where if I was perfect my ârewardâ was not being screamed at. To my peers in school who would bully me for every little âweirdâ slip up that demonstrated that Iâm neurodivergent. To every marginalized person or group Iâve heard disparaged over the smallest thing. And in a moment of unexpected understanding I realized what it is about discussions about âcancel cultureâ that always felt off to me.
The way we treat each other online is not new. It is not unique. It is not some modern product of the rise of ess-jay-double-you wokescolds. Itâs the way weâve always been taught to treat each other, we do it offline every day. The only reason anyone sees it as unique is that the nature of it being online means that it isnât as precise in only targeting those who weâre taught to turn a blind eye to.
Fixing this and doing better is systemic, which I guess I shouldâve seen coming since most things are systemic. I definitely donât have an answer to this, but I can see now that no amount of âjust not cancelling peopleâ is the answer, because âcancellingâ is just a fancy way of dividing twitter fights from all the other ways weâre actively taught to be horrible to each other, and if weâre not pulling this up at the roots we wonât really fix it. I feel like I should end on advice so, burn the capitalists in your heads and radically support each other? Thatâs probably a good first step.
some of my own observations from starting out online at like 12 in 1997 and watching things develop:
1. all thrown together: people of wildly different backgrounds and knowledge bases are all communicating and very quickly which leads to everyone essentially being embarrassingly ignorant all the time. To alleviate the resultant discomfort we lean into:
2. humans want things to be simple and easy. We want the cliff notes version rather than the nuanced and lengthy explanation and all of the background to understand it, especially if it doesnât involve us or interest us. âThatâs bad, donât do it. This is good, say this.â Easy to remember, easy to understand, easy to preform for the above mentioned need for a reward in the form of approbation or inclusion. Details and nuance, especially with the vast amount of stuff being discussed isnât possible, practical, or comfortable all the time.
3. technology out pacing culture: adapting socially to new technology via etiquette and convention canât keep up with how fast everything is going. How I learned to behave online at 12 has gone out of date several times and Iâm only 36, and I donât mean the things relating to me being a child then and an adult now but that almost none of what I learned as an early teenager even can be applied to tumblr in a practical sense. Everyone keeps having to make this up as they go, and due to point 1, we all have wildly different ideas on how to deal with things and different expectations. And it all changes multiple times in your life, you can feel out of touch and dated at 25. Social norms always have their problems and are always changing, but their lack of cohesiveness and turbo speed changing online has itâs consequences. Volume is also an issueâthe sheer number of new things we need communally agreed on rules for is staggering. Similarly:
4. zooooom!: even before the internet and then itâs upgrade to high speed internet the pace of life has been accelerating and this means we expect things to go fast. Weâre used to things going fast and even want them to, to some degree. And includes social media feeds and communication. Long posts were more common in 2011 when I joined tumblr and there were not tl;dr summaries. Thereâs a difference in how I type when I chat now than back in the AIM daysâmore comments sent before the other person actually finished their point (other people do it to me too). You used to wait more before you replied. Now itâs go go go! That also come connects back to point 2. And in part may come from point 3 especially how we can now use our phones in small moments like waiting in line where we previously could not have been trying to interact with humanity in the same way, things have to fit into those spaces now. The word count limits and easy to understand sound bites fit into smaller spaces.
5. Everything is everywhere. tweets are shared on tumblr and tumblr posts end up on facebook and facebook posts are referenced in youtube videos and so on. Context is easily destroyed or lost even within a platform. Thereâs so many games of telephone going on and everyone hears things through the grapevine and this is both a natural extension of human gossip and information sharing AND used maliciously and itâs all mixed in. Point 3 and 4 mean Information literacy canât keep up and the potential stage for point 1 is horribly massive. Also your nudes may end up out there or a video of your horrible murder may get shared with strangers for their entertainment (or so the demand justiceâŚ.it dependsâŚ).
6. grip on reality. while I think weâve moved mostly away from considering online some kind of opposite of âreal lifeâ given that many very real things like shopping and work and school can happen online, now itâs like: you can get a grandma changing outfits in a spiral across your screen from the same app you get make up tutorials from and someone teaching you to change your oil and someone with professional level production lip-syncing a pop song andâŚ.what IS real life? Plenty of what is on the internet isnât real and is meant for entrainment even if itâs not sold to you as such but itâs all mixed in with serious discussions about politics, practical skills, gossip, real news, fake news, airbrushed/photoshopped/facetuned influencers, etc. This started to some degree with TV but has gone so much further with the internet. Do you consciously know the difference between reality and funny videos? Probably! But wait thereâs more to this point! At the same time that all this is happening, along with you getting plenty of your marketed entertainment online, thereâs all the communication and engagement with other humans thatâs happening through a screen. You can insult someone on the otherwise of the planet now in real time or fall in love with them or find real friendships or stalk people or bully them. You can do this to people youâll never seen and never have to deal with real world consequences for harming them or helping them. This happens often in the same apps where you talk to people you have met and may indeed experience some consequences for your actions good, bad, or complicated. Is online real? It only seems to be part of the time. Do you know, if asked, that Iâm a real human with a face and a life and feelings? Probably! But at the same time Iâm a voice in a sea of mixed reality and unreality. And itâs not like we havenât had infestations of bad actors inserting themselves into conversations like this to manipulate us, thatâs a thing that happens. So how much personhood does your brain assign me while you scroll by?
Is this the real life or is it just fantasy? Caught in a landslide no escape from reality indeed.
And all of this stuff isnât necessarily negative! But how it fits together leads to some of the problems mentioned and why theyâre so complex and hard to solve.
It feels to me as if many people donât know where to place other social media users in their mindâs social landscape so they end up simultaneously demanding the accountability of a close friend or family member from them (acting as if every mistake of theirs had hurt them personally) and the public presence curation of a wealthy celebrity (treating their social media feed as a piece of fictional media).
These parasocial relationships make us hold each other to impossible standards. You canât treat human beings as if they were a TV show just because you experience them as a âstream of contentâ and you canât treat strangers as if they were personally close to you just because you have read intimate details that they have shared. Itâs fucked up.
These are allâŚvery thoughtful and insightful additions. Thank you.
Someone in the notes pointed out this is a form of what we used to call cyberbullying, and theyâre right. And itâs terrifying the extent to which itâs become so normalized that we donât even use the word cyberbullying anymore. But it is. Itâs bullying. Itâs harassment. Itâs abuse. And it is happening on an unprecedented scale. We are constantly receiving messages encouraging us to engage in these behaviors, and telling us it is good and right, that we are morally superior and will be given attention when we contribute to this culture. (And that if we donât, then we ourselves are fair targets, so it is important to strike first, and mark ourselves as one of the âgoodâ ones. Because we have all seen what happens to the âbadâ ones, and now there is fear buried inside us.) These behaviors are spreading like a virus, for a combination of reasons, and they are traumatizing our communities and their most vulnerable members.
Earlier I said I didnât know what term to use for this trend, which has at different times been called âCall Outâ and âCancelâ and âPurityâ culture, words different people have objected to and used and misused in different ways. Cyberbullying doesnât quite fit, because itâs an old term that evokes the image of an anonymous, isolated troll hiding in a basement. But online harassment is increasingly done out in the open, by multiple participants encouraging others to join, many of whom donât even realize (or choose to ignore) that they are acting out of mob mentality.*
Maybe itâs time for a new term then. I know what I personally will be calling it:
Harassment Culture, plain and simple.
Because thatâs exactly what it is. A culture promoting harassment of individualsâmob harassment, one-on-one harassment, harassment based on malicious misinformation, harassment based on genuine concerns, harassment blown out of proportion, harassment of users with platforms large or middling or microscopic. Harassment of anyone, anytime, for any reason, without warning. And harassment culture is everywhere, ingrained in our social media norms, influencing our thoughts and behaviors, poisoning the way we treat others, blinding us to the humanity of our peersâreducing people from humans to targets. And we are all at risk of becoming victim and bully both.
We need to disengage from this toxicity. We need to inject some sanity, some kindness. We need to step back, and breatheâŚand then pull out a fucking microscope and make a good long self-examination of the way we speak to and about other internet users. Of the words and attitudes we spread, of the way we are affecting real people we donât know. Because you are not screaming into the void. Because there is always a human on the other side of the screen.
Because pain is easy to ignore when it is happening to a stranger in another room. Because when we hurt people from a distance, we do not hear the muffled sobbing. So we forget too quickly that the trauma we are inflicting on each other is horrible and real. It is so real.
Iâve said it before and will repeat it again:
Do not let an obsession with being ârightâ or âgoodâ prevent you from being KIND.
Be kind. For fuckâs sake be kind.
*Mob violence is harder to recognize online. In real life, if you look around and find yourself surrounded by an above-average number of pitchforks, that is your first and strongest clue that youâve accidentally joined a mob. In online spaces, the pitchforks are hidden behind other peopleâs screens, and therefore harder to keep accurate count of. (Until, of course, they are pointed at you.)
ko-fi
