… Twitter (etc.) are specifically set up in such a way as to discourage any real-world action. Basically it’s the faculty lounge writ large. If you’ve been to college in the last half-century, you surely noticed that the faculty are Very Very Concerned about all kinds of stuff … but that the stuff they’re Very Very Concerned about is always happening to some obscure group thousands of miles away.
Even when they’re pretending to Care Very Much about, say, “systemic racism” in “America”, it would never occur to them to go down to the ghetto that, in many notorious cases, is literally right next door to do anything about it. They could find out everything they ever wanted to know — and then some!! — about “the Black Experience” by driving down MLK Blvd. at three in the morning, but somehow they never do. The way you win at victim bingo in the ivory tower is you find the most obscure group, the furthest away, to chastise your peers for not caring enough about. If what you say could possibly have any real-world application in the lives of anyone anybody you know had even the possibility of ever meeting, you lose.
Such is Social Media, so it’s no surprise that the Twitterati all fall victim to the biggest Faculty Lounge Fallacy of them all: That saying something is the same as doing something. Or, in other words, and not to put too fine a point about it, they act like passive-aggressive little bitches, like cat ladies around the company water cooler. You could get Johnny from Accounting to stop leaving his half-eaten sandwich in the lunch room fridge by simply asking him to stop … or you can have daily hen parties about it for weeks, months, years, squawking about how some people need to get some common courtesy … and meanwhile Johnny from Accounting goes on doing it, oblivious.
The genius of Facebook, Twitter, etc. — and it IS genius; sick, evil, twisted genius — is that they figured out how to monetize this.
Severian, “Internet Tough Guys”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-10.
August 28, 2021
QotD: Social media capitalizes on “the biggest Faculty Lounge Fallacy of them all”
Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: Facebook, Hypocrisy, Severian, SocialJustice, SocialMedia, Twitter, University — Nicholas @ 01:00
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