checkeredcat

[checkeredcat]

Cancel Culture: Is it fair?

Project description:

Being in quarantine has definitely increased the amount of time I personally spend on social media. I tried to read, try to exercise, but ultimately I end up on Instagram or TikTok. I’ve also been posting more for the sake of it, but I realised this comes with its’ problems. The more content you put out, the more you are sharing about yourself and your opinions, which everyone might not agree with. This got me thinking about celebrities and influencers. Their every post and opinion is being scrutinised by thousands and sometimes millions of people. Alongside this, came the development of ‘Cancel Culture’. The best definition I could find for this comes from an article by Aja Romano (2019). She writes, “Cancel culture, describes a form of boycott in which someone (usually a celebrity) who has shared a questionable or unpopular opinion, or has had behaviour that is perceived to be problematic, is called out on social media”. My project will look to understand this ‘cancel culture’ more deeply whilst uncovering the dangers of the internet due to regulations, or a lack of.

Method:

The most useful method I could use to investigate ‘cancel culture’ would be a visual discourse analysis. A discourse analysis is a qualitative research method that examines the organisation of language and images. As discussed by Van Dijk (1997), any type of discourse analysis must seek to explain who, why, how and where language is being used. What I understood from this is that there is much more behind a picture or caption which is left for the audience to interpret. To conduct a successful visual discourse analysis, one would have to interpret a deeper meaning beyond the surface of a post. A caption alongside a photo is also something to break down and analyse because it is usually used to add more meaning to a photograph. Daymon and Holloway (2002) suggest that researchers who use a discourse analysis must look at three things in specific. One is the form and content of the language used, essentially what the caption means. Another is the way people use language to communicate ideas and beliefs, meaning what they want their audience to think after seeing their post. Finally, the third one is any institutional or organisational factors which may affect the way language is being used. Therefore, in order to thoroughly conduct a discourse analysis you must make sure those three stems are accounted for. I will conduct my qualitative research by collecting data from Instagram and TikToks of five celebrities who have been ‘cancelled’ for something in the last three years. I will be screenshooting information on their posts (pictures, captions and comments) and then create a coding system of similarities across the three scenarios. This will ensure that I can pick out patterns and reoccurring themes across the three events.

Discussion:

Social networking sites can be said to alter the sense of what it means to be an individual. I believe that on social media, people usually present versions of themselves that are different or ‘better’ in their eyes to their actual self. This means people may occasionally fall into the trap of posting things they do not actually believe, in order to keep a certain image of themselves alive. With controversial posts, inevitably comes controversial backlash and hate. Nakamura and Chow-White (2013) also note that this hate is propagated via different platforms. For example, Nessa Barrett is a seventeen year old TikTok star who was recently ‘cancelled’ because she posted a video dancing inappropriately to a Quran recitation. People are understandably disgusted by what she had done and went from her TikTok to her Instagram to comment their thoughts. This is an example of what Nakamura and Chow-White were explaining. However, this so called ‘cancelled culture’ may just be more apparent to us in today’s society because there are platforms to easily share your views on. It is not necessarily that society has become more sensitive, it is purely that there is now an easy way to share your view/hate on something. This is supported by Murthy and Sharma (2018). There is a problem when it comes to theorising online antagonisms. They identify that although online hate does seem to be increasing dramatically, this may reflect a change in the way we are communicating rather than an increase in the amount of hate taking place.

Over 90 million instagram posts are made in one day. Out of this unfathomable number, can you imagine how many people experience online hate because it is so easy? The internet is clearly being regulated and watched. Situations such as Cambridge Analytica where Facebook was wrongly using peoples data exposes social networking sites as trackers of our data. If they have ultimate control over social media, why do they allow such hate to continue? If they know a post is bound to bring general upset and cause offence then they should also not allow the post to be uploaded in the first place. In addition, after an offensive post is uploaded, they should be able to limit the amount of hateful comments said to someone. After reading a revised edition of Foucualt’s (1977) work, it is clear that he warns of the ‘hierarchal observation’ we are under as humans. As societies have grown and changed, the ways in which we are ‘observed’ has changed. We are now being observed by our activities online and our digital footprints. The surveillance we are under seems to only be used at the benefit of the government rather than for the protection of our mental healths. Nessa Barrett is a seventeen year old girl. Although I do not agree with what she did, the hundreds of death threats she received would be too much for anyone to handle. In this situation, I do believe that Instagram and TikTok should have at least temporarily disabled or limited her account to people. If our content is being surveilled, it makes no sense to why posts like this are able to be uploaded in the first place. I argue that the regulation of social media is weak and this leads to an inevitable cancelling culture.

Contribution:

As mentioned earlier, I undertook a visual discourse analysis of five celebrity instances which demonstrate ‘cancel culture’. The first one was of Nessa Barrett’s comment section after dancing to the Quran and then making a public apology saying she did not know what she was dancing to. The post was obviously deleted but people still commented on all of her other content to express themselves. One comment that stood out in particular was “Filthy rat. You should not be on this earth.” It would be almost impossible for Nessa to block every person who left a hate comment and there were many more like these. Another celebrity who was cancelled in 2018 was Logan Paul. Whilst visiting a Japanese suicide forest, Logan Paul filmed a dead body whilst vlogging for his Youtube channel. This also caused outrage on Instagram and Twitter as it was trending for 3 days. Most of his comments read “That should be you lying there dead.” I accumulated some of the worst comments I saw across five situations like these, and identified the pattern that usually when a group of people like a religion or culture feel attacked by a post, the ‘cancel culture’ is heightened. Death threats are entirely too common on these posts which worries me because influencers are usually young and impressionable. This is dangerous and the internet should do a better job at regulating these comments. I think it is fair for people to stop watching your content if you have offended them, but I argue that trolls who send death threats are just as bad. Online culture has become so hateful nowadays simply due to the fact that we do not see the consequences of our actions. My findings of the visual analysis were shocking because seeing the amount of people so comfortable telling someone to “kill yourself” online was disturbing. Cancel culture is definitely concerning for society because it exists to drive hate against one person at a time until someone else makes a mistake.

Whilst I do not agree with cancel culture, I do not think it has a direct impact for long. For example, both Nessa Barrett and Logan Paul still have over one million followers online. If people were really ‘boycotting’ their content, their following would have dramatically decreased. The fact that people still follow them after supposedly being disgusted by them emphasises how ‘cancel culture’ does not actually lead to people being “cancelled” completely, but rather “cancelled” until there is someone else to hate on. Then again, once something is on the internet, it is very difficult to have it fully erased forever, so your mistakes might come back to haunt you again one day. This is also unfair, because people may drag up your past after you have grown and changed. Do we deserved to be cancelled over something we immaturely posted 10 years ago?

[checkeredcat]

Week 9: Online Hate and Racism

In this week’s lecture we focused on online hate and more specifically, racism online. The social media stream of data we have today can not be governed, and to me this makes it almost inevitable that you will experience online hate. How can it be stopped if no one is there to tell you what you are doing is wrong? Nakamura (2013) writes how racism, misogyny and homophobic abuse can not be contained due to the anonymity of the internet. People do not see that their words hold weight to the person behind the screen moreover, they know the consequences are limited. One could be blocked and reported but what effect does that really have? This generation calls ‘haters’ online ‘keyboard warriors’, because they can only give their opinions over a keyboard rather than being horrible to someone’s face.

We also specifically spoke about racism and how it is increasingly common to see a racist slur on social media. Demo’s (2014) study estimated 1 in 15,000 tweets in English include a racial/ethnic slur, coming to approximately 17,000 a day. This figure demonstrates how easy people find it to be racist online, again because the consequences are limited.

Although with this being said, I also found an example of a case where someone was sentenced for posing racist tweets about a football player. Gary Hyland was taking part in an online discussion about football when he suddenly began to be racially abusive towards Mo Salah, who plays for Liverpool. He was given a six week jail sentence and has been since banned from Twitter. This example shows that you can be punished for what you say online.

Murthy and Sharma (2018) explain that it is hard to identify the problem with online antagonisms, because there is a number of reasons why someone could be spreading hate.

In addition, in previous lectures we came across sub groups online such as ��Black twitter’ used to speak about topics only people of black heritage would understand. These avenues could also lead to issues within races due to social exclusion. This could be linked to Murthy and Sharma’s ‘discriminatory and exclusionary phenomena’. However, I think that having specific racial groups on social media is almost a defensive attack back to racism online because religions or ethnic groups celebrate their stereotypes and form an alliance against racism.

For instance there is a thread on twitter of Black girls showing their natural hair off in response to a racist tweet by a caucasian stating ‘Black girls are jealous of our hair’.

We then touched on examples of ‘technological redlining’ which I can only explain as technology reinforcing the racism in society. In 2009, if you google image searched ‘Michelle Obama’ the first result would be a morphed image of an ape. This is obviously highly racist and distasteful. It emphasises how technology has a systematic algorithm of oppression. If the internet was better regulated, racist algorithms would not be picked up because racist posts would not be allowed to stay on the internet.

[checkeredcat]

Week Three - Social Networking and the rise of Social Media.

Nancy Bayam (2015:1) defines social media as ‘any medium that allows people to make meaning together’. To me this definition presents a rose-tinted view on what being ‘social’ actually means. She compares social networking sites to ‘postcards’ and ‘landline telephones’, things people used to do with their social time. However, the social media we see today is actually used to spread opinionated views which can sometimes be more negative than positive. In short, you would not send a postcard to someone telling them how much weight they have gained, or to disagree with their opinions which people can do on social media. When she says we create ‘meaning’ together on platforms, I guess this can be true for social media pages which campaign or stand for something, but thinking of how I use social media at times, I am not sure there is much ‘meaning’ in me posting a picture of my coffee in the morning, but it is still considered social media.

Ellison and Boyd (2013) provide a more apt criteria of what culminates a social networking site (SNS). They say social networking sites can consume, produce, and interact with streams of user-generated content provided by their connections on their site. This broader definition includes all activities which are capable of doing on social media, because not everyone uses social media with the same intentions. For instance, whilst I may use social media to ‘show off' my life and show my friends what I am doing, others may not post at all and use their accounts to view celebrities or memes.

Another aspect of social networking sites is that there are different types. In the year 2000, two types were specifically dominant. Profile centric sites, meaning they are focused on you creating your page for others to view such as Linkedn, and media centric sites like Youtube where you can watch videos of a wide array. I would argue that in today’s generation, ‘viewer’ centric and ‘image’ centric were the new dominant types. This is because platforms such as TikTok require views for you to get on the main page and platforms like Instagram are based on you uploading pictures to get followers.

Helliwell and Putnam (2004) explain how social media can bring a positive effect of interaction among participants and while this is true, I think people also use this for monetary gain. The Marxist approach on social networking sites shows we are moving to a state of ‘digital labour’ where people with more followers can now gain money for advertising a brand on their page. Personally I feel like this destroys the purpose of social media being raw and to escape from the world, but I also think that the way social media grows, there will be more money in being a social media influencer than being a top surgeon!

[checkeredcat]

“A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults”

GODFATHER