#socialmedia (6 links)
- Caitlin Moran: social media went from utopia to hellhole in a decade – if you want to feel hopeful again, get offline theguardian.com
Stop listening to emergency podcasts; stop doomscrolling; go for a walk and talk to people; buy your local newspaper – and, finally, stop believing that we are living “through one of the most difficult, anxious and chaotic times in human history”.
- ‘This craving to go viral is tiresome’: the artists sick of the pressure to promote on social media theguardian.com
Surprisingly balanced.
The battle for masculinity is being fought primarily online. In the UK, 91 per cent of 11-year-olds have a phone. Boys aged seven to 16 say they spend more than two hours a day on YouTube.
Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to the way they are framed by the media. The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition – as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests – or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.