The Bizarre Inflation of Crises Via Platform
Depending on where you turn your gaze, the world is collapsing in completely different ways
During any given week in the past several months the thing to be concerned/afraid of/outraged by was:
A rogue wave that washed a tourist overboard from the deck of a cruise ship.
The rogue faction of Republican Congressional Representatives holding Kevin McCarthy’s balls to the fire.
Biden’s hypocrisy in also having classified documents in a cardboard box in his garage.
Random black people throwing tantrums in retail stores and destroying property.
White women calling the cops on black people not throwing tantrums and destroying property.
The movement to replace pasteurized milk, oat milk, almond milk, an soy milk with raw milk.
Environmental activism throwing soup on famous paintings.
Respectively, each of these horrors of the modern world can be found on: CNN, MSNBC, FOX, Faceborg, Twitter, TikTok, and a coupla podcasts. Each platform seems to prioritize a different threat to us all but none of them are what I’d call big issues.
For about a week straight I thought the biggest issue facing Americans was trend of retail customers (mostly black according to the torrent of videos presented) who, when told their check won’t be cashed or they can’t just steal stuff or any number of inconvenient but benign interactions, go completely apeshit, destroying displays, trashing POS system equipment, and screaming incoherently throughout.
It turns out that these situations are pretty rare but, if you crawl down that specific rabbit hole, this is happening everywhere at alarming rates.
I believe the tendency for college administrators to cave in to the demands of the Twitter mob is that when you’re getting your news of the world from one or two social media sources (and, let’s face it, journalists from all forms of more traditional media are doing exactly that) you only see the algorithm pumping out the inflation of this or that crisis depending on the day and the platform.
Hop on YouTube and if you ever once typed in “Wednesday Dance Sequence” to revisit Jenna Ortega’s fun dance in that Netflix behemoth, you’ll be convinced within two days that no one on the planet isn’t obsessed with this dance—young women recreating it, side-by-side reactions to these young women recreating it, groups recreating it on public streets. I think I spent almost two hours watching this and wondering what the world was doing about this overwhelming addiction to a minute long dance sequence on a show.
Here’s where it gets even thornier:
At over three billion downloads, TikTok has become one of the world’s biggest platforms. It is estimated that over 100 million Americans engage on TikTok on a monthly basis. TikTok, and to a lesser degree their Chinese parent company ByteDance, have been under fire for attempting to capture Americans’ data.
What do they do with that data? They silo you in communications (certainly there’s a nefarious Chinese plot to sublimate our children but according to certain segments of Twitter, so are teachers, right wing parents, CRT prognosticators, and drag queens. Get in line CCCP… ). They stratify what you see based on what you've seen. If I swipe up and catch a video of two skateboarders beating the shit out of each other and I watch it to the end, I guarantee that I will see hundreds of exactly the same video.
In essence, we aren’t creating these divisions amongst us, we are being herded into these camps. As long as we still get our news and cultural critique from these platforms (television, radio, digital media, and social networks) in exclusion of a more robust sort of curiosity about things, we are doomed to think the world is ending one video at a time.
