Cancel culture, tool or weapon?
Cancel culture, possibly one of if not the biggest miss use of social media. Where people lives can be terminated in a matter of minutes. With the rise of social media, the world is more connected than ever, people from all over capable of communicating as if the other person were simply across the table from them. Along with this kind of tech comes a new profound power. The ability to cancel (a form of shaming) anyone for saying/doing something the public doesn’t agree with. With this kind of power the people could use it for good in order to help bring change. But instead we use it to burn normal people’s lives for nothing more than some clicks or views online. Instead of bringing change like we could, we’d rather destroy the lives of relatively innocent people for what, social justice? Please tell me what does the destruction of people’s lives do that help make that person better?
The short answer, it doesn’t, and there isn’t an exact group that is targeted either. People don’t only go after the Klansman, or neo Nazis. They’ll target anyone for any reason. You can easily go from the canceler to the canceled with the snap of your fingers. A perfect example of this was from a NPR podcast called “The callout.” The podcast talked about a punk Rockstar named Emily who was a member of a hardcore punk band in Richmond, Va. One day while on tour she received news that her best friend was accused of sending unwelcomed sexual pictures to a woman. Her friend of course denied these allegations, however Emily didn’t buy it and in an act of social justice took to face book to publicly denounce her ,now ex bestfriend, as an abuser. “I disown everything he has done. I do not think it’s O.K…I believe women.” Through her “righteous” acts her former friend basically lost everything, he was kicked from his band, forced to leave the punk scene, Emily even heard rumors that he was fired, evicted, and forced to move to a new city. With one post she destroyed everything that man had for not even commiting the act but rather the allegation of it. Just think about that, a life destroyed over the accusation of a photo, and as her former friend suffered she prospered fronting her own band. But as fate would have it her actions of canceling would come back to haunt her. A few years later she would get exposed for posting an emoji in a group chat as a response for a indecent picture of a former high school classmate that was sent nearly a decade prior. Just as she denounced her friend a few years before people came after her. She was kicked from the punk scene, her friends left her, and she was forced into hiding for months. As for her canceler? He was a man named Herbert who when interviewed described calling her out ”… a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm.” Then when asked if he cared about what Emily went through after he cold heartily responded ”..I literally do not care about what happens to (her) after the situation. I don’t care if she’s dead, alive, whatever.”
While true that these canceled people have said or done some really regrettable things that are clearly not acceptable in today’s world, there is really one difference between us and them. They were caught doing their act. Anyone that says they have never said or done something deemed socially unacceptable is quite frankly lying. We as people are prone to make undesirable mistakes, that’s what comes with developing as a person. But for a majority of us these incidents aren’t put online, they aren’t exposed to the web for all to see and judge, also its important to note that even though these people messed up, they are still people, with thoughts and dreams, and feelings. For when we ignore these facts we can truly become inhumane in our actions.
Cancel culture itself stems from public shaming. They are one in the same with the only difference is that cancel culture is directly rooted on the internet while public shaming can occur just about anywhere. As described in D, Trottier’s ”Coming to terms with shame” Shaming itself is “…necessarily assembled, as it depends on a loosely and often spontaneously arranged network of actors to convey denunciation.” Meaning that it can only occur when people deem it fit to be. Further going on stating ”Digitals tools further the expansion of such networks, a development that is of particular concern for surveillance scholars.” Due to current technology anything that is caught on camera can instantly be posted and forwarded online leading from one person having their hands on the video/photo to millions in under an hour. Because of this extreme growth its incredibly easy for people watching these recent videos to reach conclusion’s before hearing out the full story, leading to a extremely fast and usually brutal cancellation.
The creation of social media only flames cancel cultures growth. Look no further than the story previously mentioned that involved Emily. Both her cancellation and her former friends reached the level of severity it did because of social media’s reach. You would never see a story about posting a emoji in a group chat to make fun of someone ever reach the news. However it’s not hard at all to see it get posted on Twitter or Facebook and watch it spread like wildfire. That’s because social media grants cancellers something that the news never could for public shaming. It sheaths the cancellers behind a profile, able to remain completely anonymous(if he/she wanted) , and rarely forces them to face the consequences for their cancelations.
References
Brooks, David . 2019. “The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture.” New York Times, January 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/call-out-social-justice.html.
Trottier, D. (2018). Coming to terms with shame: Exploring mediated visibility against transgressions. Surveillance & Society, 16(2), 170-182. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.rowan.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Fcoming-terms-with-shame-exploring-mediated%2Fdocview%2F2138979618%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D13605
The callout. (2018, April 13). Retrieved March 08, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/2018/04/13/601971617/the-callout
612119d
bluntwriting88
capched
cardinal7218
carsonwentz1186
cfriery
chavanillo
christianity19
clementine102
comicdub
compiistudent
corinnebuck1219
daphneblake25
davidbdale
dayzur
g903254
gabythefujoshi18
goldin92
gooferious
hailthegreat8
hazelnutlatte123
honeysucklelilac
icedcoffeeislife
imgoingswimming
iwantpopsicle
doorknob9
BabyGoat
jeffbezos123
jets1313
johnwick66
justheretopass
kobebryant32
kowiklinski
l8tersk8ter
aquarela
metro111c
mrmba1
mysterylimbo
nina525
nousernamefound1
nyaj32
oaktree1234
pardonmyfrench13
person345
pomegranate4800
Jessicariccio
rosekyd
rowanrat
rowanstudent24
runnerd4
shadowswife
SmilingDogTheProfWants
sonnypetro29
tcarter101
thecommoncase
wafflesrgud22
wazoo1234
yourfavoriteanon
Counterintuitivity 
John Wick, I sense and appreciate the passion here, but not the scholarship. You are tackling your subject as if it were trying to prevent it from running away from you. We understand it well enough that you don’t have to worry about losing it. It’s been captured and handcuffed. Now begins the systematic and sober interrogation of your perpetrator. You’ve already pronounced it guilty, and apparently it has no redeeming qualities. But you might want to step back a bit and consider how it came to be. Surely the surveillance camera wasn’t placed in the store FOR THE PURPOSE OF driving a woman to suicide. Obviously the purpose of the newspaper, and the social media platforms that propagated the story of the wallet theft (and the girlfriend abuse of the earlier story) was not TO ACT AS EXECUTIONER of all its participants’ lives. The question of how they morphed into what they’ve become is worth consideration.
When Emily shamed her friend for abusing a woman, did she do so in her publicly-recognizable persona? Or did she do so anonymously? Either case would be instructive.
I couldn’t tell from your post that the story of the wallet came from your one academic source, but I followed the link to “Coming to Terms with Shame” and found some very academic language and an attitude of engaged curiosity about the subject of cancel culture that I expect to see reflected in your later drafts and Portfolio posts.
For example:
That’s interesting. Security companies and agencies, police body cams, or simply businesses with surveillance cameras used to treat the materials they gathered as “for personal use” or “for internal use” in conducting investigations. The new development is that they find their way now into the public sphere, where the “social media mob” can jump to conclusions and act as executioners without a full hearing.
Also very interesting (minus the nonsense about morphologies). Our personal lives have become much more public, and the supposed moral GOOD of shaming motivates good people to share what they think they know, whatever the cost to the unproven guilty. Shame is CULTURAL VIOLENCE. Society tacitly endorses it as a way to control behavior, but so far there appear to be no legal consequences for the shamers, even when their actions result in DIRE CONSEQUENCES for people who may have DONE NO WRONG. Your Emily caught some karma, but only by accident. Nobody held her accountable the way she held her former friend accountable.
Also interesting. We haven’t yet as a culture had the conversation about the proliferation of media WAY beyond the usually responsible traditional mainstream news sources. For example, the institutional press would withhold the names of minors involved in a crime (even the victims) as a way to protect them from public scrutiny. That shield has now been broken. Once a single social media source leaks a detail, the public is free to run with it, take it from context, share just the inflammatory or despicable snippets of audio and video, and tag the person that would have been protected from uninformed scrutiny in a less-saturated media age.
Do you see what I’m getting at? You’ve selected an immensely rich topic and settled on a thoughtful and informed source to guide your thinking. Don’t now settle for a blog rant as your contribution to the conversation.
I mentioned to you after class that I had with misgivings permitted the inclusion of a blunt swear word in a former student’s blog post arguments. Maybe you took that as encouragement to juice your own jargon. If so, I regret misguiding you. The word I sanctioned was the ACTUAL CONTENT of my former student’s Hypothesis. Your use of shits and giggles and the other overly informal language doesn’t serve your rhetorical needs here. You’re the authoritative voice on a subject with life and death consequences. Be more responsible than the mob you’re pillorying.
Delete paragraph three, John Wick, and while you’re cutting it, recognize how little it contributes to a thoughtful examination of your topic that hasn’t been said in other paragraphs.
The passion and moral concern that are driving your language are admirable and very valuable. Don’t lose them. But do maximize the value of the sources you find to make the most intelligent arguments you can support with logic, evidence, and reason.
Feedback, revisions, and regrades all take place here on this post. When you’ve made substantial changes, submit for a regrade as many times as needed to achieve the result you want.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ok professor thank you for the feedback. I’m going to try to make some adjustments to this by the end of the week and put it in feedback please.
LikeLike
Really good to hear, John Wick. This is going to be a very fine essay on an important topic.
LikeLike
Post has been Regraded.
LikeLike
Thank you professor
LikeLike
Language use remains the obstacle to better grades for your work, John Wick, and one semester of Comp II is too short a time to improve it enough. A few examples from your first sentences:
This is a fragment, not a sentence. It contains no verb. The problem is easily solved with an “is.” So:
—Cancel culture is possibly one of if not the biggest miss use of social media.
You qualify your claim twice. 1) It’s possibly the biggest. 2) It’s possibly just one of the biggest. You could say it’s one of the biggest. Or you could say it’s possibly one of the biggest (which would mean it’s almost certainly one of the biggest). So:
—Cancel culture is possibly the biggest miss use of social media.
“Miss” and “use” are both words, but you’ve misused both of them. So:
—Cancel culture is possibly the biggest misuse of social media.
This is another fragment, not a sentence. Here the problem is the “where,” which makes your clause dependent. Independent clauses are sentences. To fix this problem, connect your clauses. So:
—Cancel culture is possibly the biggest misuse of social media, where people lives can be terminated in a matter of minutes.
“people lives” are presumably the lives of people, which requires a possessive. So:
—Cancel culture is possibly the biggest misuse of social media, where people’s lives can be terminated in a matter of minutes.
When lives are terminated, people die. I know you don’t mean that. You mean their social lives or their reputations are obliterated. So:
—Cancel culture is possibly the biggest misuse of social media, where people’s reputations can be obliterated in a matter of minutes.
The frequent companion of the fragment is the comma splice. Here you connect two independent clauses with a comma, an illegal construction. So:
—With the rise of social media, the world is more connected than ever. People from all over capable of communicating as if the other person were simply across the table from them.
Now it’s obvious that the second sentence is another fragment like your first because it lacks a verb, which can again easily be solved with an “are.” So:
—With the rise of social media, the world is more connected than ever. People from all over are capable of communicating as if the other person were simply across the table from them.
Those changes make good, capable sentences, but they still lack the polish of better writing. So:
—People from across the globe communicate as if their correspondent were across the table.
Finished product:
Stated that way, it’s obvious the logic runs in the wrong direction. Fixed:
I never expect that last version, but the Finished Product version is well within reach for many of your classmates who have developed good sentence-making skills before they arrived at this class.
LikeLike