you know how some parents do that toxic thing where they don’t notice or reward kids for improving their behavior, but every screw-up gets remarked upon and used to inflict shame? so you’re 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 there’s 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 don’t know how to explain to you that we’ve built a social media culture that treats people the same way. with the same abusive cycle.
That sounds like cancel culture
I don’t know what to call it anymore. people get heated about terms like “purity” or “cancel” or “call out” culture, or can’t seem to agree on a meaning. I’m not talking about like. no longer supporting rich and powerful celebrities when their abusive actions come to light. I’m 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 people’s social media accounts, looking for “problematic” shit they’ve done. I am concerned with the whole culture of using “call outs” as a tool to harass and ostracize users large and small. I am concerned about the malice we spread behind people’s backs, in screenshots and posts they aren’t 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. I’m 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. I’m concerned about the way this culture targets minority users and turns their own communities against them. I’m 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 “called out” 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 “influencers,” 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 “rich and powerful celebrities.” (Because apparently we spend so much time in online microcosms that ya’ll can’t tell the difference???) Christ, my blog isn’t nearly as large as some people seem to think, it’s obscure by most measures, and still I’ve been the target of mass harassment for years. I’ve seen bad and watched others go through worse, seen users with far larger and far smaller followings driven off of this and other platforms—driven 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 wasn’t expecting. I read the first paragraphs, about being raised in an environment where you’re 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 I’ve held where if I was perfect my “reward” was not being screamed at. To my peers in school who would bully me for every little “weird” slip up that demonstrated that I’m neurodivergent. To every marginalized person or group I’ve heard disparaged over the smallest thing. And in a moment of unexpected understanding I realized what it is about discussions about “cancel culture” 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. It’s the way we’ve 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 isn’t as precise in only targeting those who we’re taught to turn a blind eye to.
Fixing this and doing better is systemic, which I guess I should’ve seen coming since most things are systemic. I definitely don’t have an answer to this, but I can see now that no amount of “just not cancelling people” is the answer, because “cancelling” is just a fancy way of dividing twitter fights from all the other ways we’re actively taught to be horrible to each other, and if we’re not pulling this up at the roots we won’t really fix it. I feel like I should end on advice so, burn the capitalists in your heads and radically support each other? That’s 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 doesn’t involve us or interest us. “That’s bad, don’t do it. This is good, say this.” 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 isn’t possible, practical, or comfortable all the time.
3. technology out pacing culture: adapting socially to new technology via etiquette and convention can’t keep up with how fast everything is going. How I learned to behave online at 12 has gone out of date several times and I’m only 36, and I don’t 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 it’s consequences. Volume is also an issue–the sheer number of new things we need communally agreed on rules for is staggering. Similarly:
4. zooooom!: even before the internet and then it’s upgrade to high speed internet the pace of life has been accelerating and this means we expect things to go fast. We’re 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. There’s a difference in how I type when I chat now than back in the AIM days–more 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 it’s 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. There’s 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 it’s all mixed in. Point 3 and 4 mean Information literacy can’t 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 justice….it depends…).
6. grip on reality. while I think we’ve moved mostly away from considering online some kind of opposite of “real life” given that many very real things like shopping and work and school can happen online, now it’s 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 and….what IS real life? Plenty of what is on the internet isn’t real and is meant for entrainment even if it’s not sold to you as such but it’s 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 there’s more to this point! At the same time that all this is happening, along with you getting plenty of your marketed entertainment online, there’s all the communication and engagement with other humans that’s 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 you’ll 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 I’m a real human with a face and a life and feelings? Probably! But at the same time I’m a voice in a sea of mixed reality and unreality. And it’s not like we haven’t had infestations of bad actors inserting themselves into conversations like this to manipulate us, that’s 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 isn’t necessarily negative! But how it fits together leads to some of the problems mentioned and why they’re so complex and hard to solve.
It feels to me as if many people don’t know where to place other social media users in their mind’s 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 can’t treat human beings as if they were a TV show just because you experience them as a “stream of content” and you can’t treat strangers as if they were personally close to you just because you have read intimate details that they have shared. It’s fucked up.
These are all…very thoughtful and insightful additions. Thank you.
Someone in the notes pointed out this is a form of what we used to call cyberbullying, and they’re right. And it’s terrifying the extent to which it’s become so normalized that we don’t even use the word cyberbullying anymore. But it is. It’s bullying. It’s harassment. It’s 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 don’t, then we ourselves are fair targets, so it is important to strike first, and mark ourselves as one of the “good” ones. Because we have all seen what happens to the “bad” 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 didn’t know what term to use for this trend, which has at different times been called ‘Call Out’ and ‘Cancel’ and ‘Purity’ culture, words different people have objected to and used and misused in different ways. Cyberbullying doesn’t quite fit, because it’s 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 don’t even realize (or choose to ignore) that they are acting out of mob mentality.*
Maybe it’s time for a new term then. I know what I personally will be calling it:
Harassment Culture, plain and simple.
Because that’s exactly what it is. A culture promoting harassment of individuals–mob 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 peers–reducing 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 breathe…and 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 don’t 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.
I’ve said it before and will repeat it again:
Do not let an obsession with being “right” or “good” prevent you from being KIND.
Be kind. For fuck’s 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 you’ve accidentally joined a mob. In online spaces, the pitchforks are hidden behind other people’s screens, and therefore harder to keep accurate count of. (Until, of course, they are pointed at you.)
ko-fi
