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'The Room Had Started To Smell. Really Quite Bad': Stephen Fry Exits Twitter (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: For a man so readily associated with words — and certainly for a wordsmith so enamored with technology — Twitter seems like something of a natural home for Stephen Fry. Over the years he has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, but last night he closed his account. Fry's latest exit from Twitter (there have been several over the last few years for numerous reasons) came about because of the backlash he received for making a joke at an award ceremony. Hosting the BATFAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) on Sunday, he referred to costume designer and award winner (and, indeed, friend) Jenny Beavan as being 'dressed as a bag lady'. 'Offended' Twitter users attacked Fry in their droves, and he fought a valiant battle, before eventually giving up and terminating his account. It comes just days after Twitter set up a new Trust & Safety Council.
I work in a job where (as a "thought leader") I'm supposed to tweet regularly, but I never, ever find time to read anything from Twitter. It's a write-only assignment as far as I'm concerned - it could be /dev/null for all I know or care.
I'll bet there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people like me out there too, all dumping regularly scheduled 140-character tweets into a space probably half populated with advertiser's bots using keyword-based algorithm to retweet, favorite and react to my stuff, all for the benefit of even more robots.
I am no social media guru, but I am seeing a slow trend toward abandoning social media. I myself eradicated my facebook account several years ago. Why? So much endless bullshit and a total waste of time. From there I migrated to a young, sparsely populated Google+. It was good for awhile. A few weeks ago I deleted my G+ account. Why? So much bullshit and a total waste of time. Never had a twitter account and never will. I will admit that I am as of recently on Diaspora, and while I have reservations of it turning into so much shit, it is actually pretty easy to tune out what you don't want and most people only post casually and not so frequently since there is no model for a popularity contest in place. It's decentralized, federated model is pretty unique to. Yet I suspect that at some time in the future I will abandon it over... so much bullshit. I know a lot of people from many walks of life who, reluctantly, dropped social media. I know the likes of Facebook and Twitter have massive user bases, but it is a start and the citizens of the internet like trends. Social media is a blight on human civilization, I can only hope that at some point it will in fact come to an end.
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No, "SJW" means someone who has made social justice their cause. The term "social justice warrior" started out as a positive self-identification. It acquired its negative connotations because of the way social justice activists behaved while wearing that moniker.
Of course, the part that is really offensive about "social justice" and its activists is their misuse of the term "justice"; what they are advocating isn't "justice", it is oppression and totalitarian government, often driven by selfish motives.
Rather than debate the meaning and origin of the term "SJW", it's easier just to call these people "social justice activists" and then call out their hypocrisy and condemn them and their activism.