<
https://www.vox.com/culture/23899842/annoying-tweets-ignore-discourse-bait-social-media-anger>
"Two weeks ago, I saw a tweet that was written, I believe, with the sole
purpose of annoying me. It wasn’t just a bad take; there are a lot of those on
the internet. This one happened to nail all of my Personal Qualms With Society
Today. It was indicative of all the little ways things seemed to be getting
increasingly bad out there, and — as these tweets always are — was dripping
with smarminess.
The tweet, which I will not be linking to for reasons that will become clear,
argued that if you see someone filming a video of themselves in public, you
should wait for them to be done before walking past the camera and ruining
their video. “If you can’t do this then you don’t deserve to be part of a
civilized society,” it read. This would be a fairly reasonable argument (within
the context of standard internet hyperbolism) had the video in question not
been filmed on a subway platform just as a train was entering the station.
These supposedly rude, heartless people walking in front of the camera had,
literally, nowhere else to go.
I could list everything that pissed me off about this tweet, not least the
writer’s follow-up reply that used the attractiveness of the girl in the video
as a way to justify her behavior (and then resorted to classism by insulting
people who can’t “afford a bigger car” and therefore were “crowding the
trains”): It presents itself as a fundamentally pro-social opinion — that you
should be considerate in public — without considering the safety of the 99
percent of people on the subway platform who weren’t taking videos of
themselves in a crowded space; it prioritizes the desires of the person using
public transit as a backdrop over the needs of the people using it for getting
to where they were going; it attempts to dignify fundamentally undignified
behavior (you should, I firmly believe, be at least a little embarrassed to
take pictures of yourself no matter where you are, but especially when it
inconveniences others). Worst, it reads as an appeal to the value of politeness
and sociability while arguing for its exact opposite. “This is how societies
end,” said the tweet, as if people’s annoyance that some random lady’s TikTok
was more important than their safe commute was akin to the sacking of Rome. “No
no,” I thought, “this, in fact, is how societies end.”
I’d already lost, obviously. The tweet had got me, and getting got by bad
tweets is loser behavior. So I’m writing this as a reminder to myself, but also
as a reminder to the nearly 20,000 people who quote-tweeted it: You simply have
to ignore discourse bait."
Via
Garbage Day: Why do Facebook users keep commenting “amen” on stuff?
https://www.garbageday.email/p/why-do-facebook-users-keep-commenting
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
