Slashdot Mirror
Social Media and the Age of Microcomplaints (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "Name an inequity, and it is highly likely that social media has helped call meaningful attention to it, if not started and hashtagged a movement," claims the NY Times. The article suggests people are much more willing to complain about meaningless issues now that they have a public audience. "The smartphone in particular has facilitated extemporaneous caviling. Irritations that the passage of time may have soothed can, in the moment, be immediately expressed to an audience." Further, an aggrieved social media post can lend more weight to a minor problem than the author ever intended, or than it deserved. An offhand tweet can lead to a nationwide media frenzy as people who aren't connected with a complaint's author lack perspective and emotional context for it.
There are far to many people walking around in a fog of narcissism thinking that everything is about them. Take, for example, that pretentious asshat that is Bono commenting on the Paris attacks saying that the terrorists were targeting music. News flash, Bono, this isn't about you.
Walmart Corporate got a hold of me after I posted several microcomplaints online and satisfied my situation much in my benefit within a few hours. Instead of losing my business forever (especially since a Costco just recently opened, they earned it back).
Those were not microcomplaints on your part. That was a legit response to bad service.
A microcomplaint is something like getting all pissed off about the font on the mattress not being bold instead of regular. Or taking a snowflake off of a coffee cup and igniting a shitstorm.
Or me complaining that microcomplaint annoys my spell checker.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If even the staunchly illiberal publications like New York Times and The Atlantic complain about there being too many grievances, it must, indeed, be a real problem.
A problem, they helped facilitate, I might add. Because, when people are simply pursuing happiness, one can get a (sorely mistaken!!) impression, everything is right in the land of Capitalism — so, if causes for real complaints are gone, we must dig deeper to rouse up new ones. Somebody complimented your demeanour? They must be RACIST!.. Girls learn belly-dancing — to stay fit and please their boyfriends? They are appropriating! And so on.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think a lot of this is driven by the fact that many people have realised, consciously or otherwise, that they enjoy being angry. That they get some sort of validation or self-worth from it.
A few months back, I dropped out of participation in a TV/movies forum I'd been a member of for years, largely due to a growing trend in "hate watching". This is where people would pick a show they hated, sometimes for artistic reasons but more commonly for political reasons, watch it all the way through and post in great acerbic detail about everything they hated about it. This, of course, led to people who liked that show jumping in to defend it and launching their own retaliatory "hate watches" and meant that more or less every thread broke down into a flamewar.
Previously, people had just not watched shows they didn't like beyond the first episode or two. Everything was a lot more live-and-let-live. Problem was, of course, the forum's moderators realised that the hate watch flamewars were producing masses and masses of page-views and therefore advertising views. So instead of trying to dampen things down, they did everything they could to encourage it.
This is part of the problem; the current financial model for most of the web (and social media in particular) is based around ad-views. As anger and outrage lead to lots of page-views, the financial incentive is to keep people in a state of perpetual quivering outrage.
That's just part of the explanation, of course. I'd look to colleges for most of the rest.
That'd be the one where the media decided to smear gamers as "worse than isis, terrorists, terrorist supporters, harassers, misogynists," and three dozen other things. It hasn't stopped, if gamers at this point can be blamed for something the media does it. Even if facts don't fit the evidence, because it's convenient.
Om, nomnomnom...