{"id":35588,"date":"2018-04-10T01:00:47","date_gmt":"2018-04-10T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35588"},"modified":"2018-03-20T09:25:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T13:25:06","slug":"qotd-the-built-in-toxicity-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/10\/qotd-the-built-in-toxicity-of-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The built-in toxicity of social media"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The internet age has brought us a medium with a bias towards even more gutteral, visceral messaging. Social media encourage short, punchy messages, and by punchy, I mean people are trying to punch each other with words. The medium has a bias towards stridency and absolutism, because you really can&#8217;t include too much nuance and caveat in 140 characters.<\/p>\n<p>It also has a strong bias towards anger, because, as far as short missives go, &#8220;Go fuck yourself&#8221; has the virtue of being brief, direct, and very easy to write.<\/p>\n<p>Much easier to write a bunch of fuck yous to strangers than compose an article explaining your beliefs or the defects of the claims of those you disagree with.<\/p>\n<p>And a lazy medium thereby encourages lazy thinking.<\/p>\n<p>I kind of think anything important one has to say should be said in person. If you&#8217;re going to break up with someone, it should be in person.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re going to tell someone you&#8217;ll never speak to him again because he supports a candidate you don&#8217;t like, you should probably man up to deliver that message in person, too.<\/p>\n<p>If you have the guts. But that&#8217;s hard. Much easier just to rip someone in a 140 character Sick Burn.<\/p>\n<p>Ace, <a href=\"http:\/\/minx.cc:1080\/?post=365307\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Divisive Political Season Causing Mass Unfriending on FaceBook&#8221;, <em>Ace of Spades H.Q.<\/em><\/a>, 2016-08-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The internet age has brought us a medium with a bias towards even more gutteral, visceral messaging. Social media encourage short, punchy messages, and by punchy, I mean people are trying to punch each other with words. The medium has a bias towards stridency and absolutism, because you really can&#8217;t include too much nuance and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41],"tags":[391,593,310],"class_list":["post-35588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-facebook","tag-socialmedia","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9g0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35589,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35588\/revisions\/35589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}