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.
Just microignore them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When I first read the term, I was confused. When I first read the tumblr about it, I was fluctuating between disgust and amusement.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I think they have the term right. 1000 microaggressions makes a milliaggression, and 1000 milliaggressions form one standard aggression.
Since most of us deal with dozens of aggressions each day, this provides a proper reference frame for just how blatantly sheltered and whiny anyone who counts microaggressions must be. Yes, all of you counting microaggressions, you can take my derision and disgust at your fragility as 1.13 milliagressions.
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.
Microcomplaints may make a mountain out of a mole hill, but it may also give management (or at least someone higher up the food chain) and opportunity to earn back business.
Several years ago I ordered a mattress online at Sam's club. I waited for it to be delivered. And waited. And waited. After missing several dates it turns out that their vendor screwed up the order and it never even went into manufacturing despite being told that it had really been shipped. None of the CSRs at Sam's club or the vendor really cared about me or gave me any options other than keep waiting. 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).
Like those tweets last year that kicked off the biggest video game moral panic since Columbine? Or would Slashdot prefer to keep singing that tune?
Social media has created a new scary norm where that "nationwide media frenzy" (mob mentality) is the prosecutor, jury, and judge and your employer's fear of reputational risk is the executioner.
It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. Logic doesn't apply - only perception management.
The new, widely-embraced form of discrimination is having an opinion different than that of the mob. Our laws need to adjust to form adequate civil protections.
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.
Back in the early 90s when websites were just being created and foisted upon us (yes, kids, there was an Internet (long) before there was a slashdot!) a funny and insightful friend said this, "I don't know about this new World Wide Web thing. It's going to make people think they're a resource." Blogs are one realization of her forecast. I see social media (and all the crap that goes on it) as another form of it.
Did she ever call *that* one!
Jason Van Patten
being a crybaby for the most part. Twitter & FB, have been 2 of the WORST things, for the most part, for the entire world. It's a prime example (for the USA) why the founding fathers were INTELLIGENT to set up our country, as a representative republic, and NOT an outright democracy. Democracy is nothing but touchy feely emotional rule. Use Ferguson as a prime example. FB, twitter blew up about how a white police officer, killed a "poor misunderstood gentle giant" who was running away from the officer. Then, by the time the FACTS in the case came out, that he had already fought the officer, tried to take his gun, was running TOWARD the officer...it was too late, the town was destroyed. With "instant" media comes a huge responsibility, but, in this day and age, we have no real media. What we have is "tmz media".