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.
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.
Darling, Slashdot is one of those forums, where ideas and arguments slightly bigger than what would fit on a bumper-sticker — or even a Tweet — are welcome. I suggest, you use that feature of the site next time you have something to say.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Said the man, oops, the person, whose idea of "articulating" a point is to add curse-words to his/her/its/their speech.
I don't need no negro's permission to say "negro", thank you very much. The word simply means "black" — as in "Negro Lives Matter" — and, incidentally, that's exactly, how Blacks are called in Ukrainian, Russian, and a whole host of other languages. It is perfectly neutral.
Oh, wow, maybe, you are articulate, after all! In one phrase you managed to violate all the rules:
I'm going on a hunger strike in protest — until Slashdot editors apologize and resign for fostering an environment, which allowed you to mentally-rape me with your angry speech. Safe Zone! Safe Zone! Safe Zone!!! Please don't hate...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.