Popular Media And Cancel Culture

[BurnedOut]

This is a call for discussion. Share your opinions about what you feel about the whole thing.

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"With great power, comes great responsibility." Does this equal to: "With great popularity, comes great responsibility."?

The truth is, it is rather difficult to answer this question - Popularity does not equal to being responsible for your followers' actions or does it?

This is actually a very controversial statement given how much flak social media receive for not being able to 'regulate' their content online during election times. However, actually, it does make social media quite responsible during election time because partisan behaviour is rather easy to justify with logic than not. Even if everybody here on intpforum is a leftist, there are some arguments of the rightist that are quite difficult to disprove. In the case of US, it is about how much power should the federal government wield and in the case of India, it is similar but slightly more nuanced due to regionalism that prevails (not that it is necessarily a bad thing). Ironically, I, myself, support the regionalism narrative in many cases regarding my own state and I support the leftist narrative in the case of US. If you ask me about my justifications, I would be happy to spout out my justifications because I have studied these issues rather deeply as I am a political science major.

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How does this relate to popular culture? I believe that judging popular culture is slightly easier. Followers of particular 'influencers' (say, performers, musicians, actresses and actors, etc) should be held responsible for their own actions. If suppose a fan of Radiohead ends up committing suicide after listening to 'Creep' (which is actually why the song was banned for a while on radio), the fan should be held liable than the band. Just because a band releases a melancholic song so poignant that it drives someone to suicide, the band cannot be subjected to hatred unless they are actively propagating certain ideas and driving people to commit them. This is where the fun really starts.

The fucking quagmire is so complex that free speech itself comes into fire - Should people who are responsible for influencing a suggestible crowd be held liable? And if so, what is the blame that should be assigned to this 'suggestible' crowd?

Nobody knows the answer to this. There are either blanket bans on a whole range of things or nothing ensues. This is a problem that freedom of expression will face until it is constitutionally revoked.

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Let us flip the tables and exclude the political stuff. Let us focus purely on the popular culture.

• Do you think followers of such influencers are responsible for the grave things that they commit in the name of being influenced? And if yes, to what extent?
• Do you think a popular person deservers flak for their past behaviours which are irrelevant in contemporary times?
• Is it hypocritical to harshly judge such a person just because they are popular? If no, how do you justify your answer for the bullet point above this one?

 

[ZenRaiden]

Free speech is not anti authoritarian.
Free speech is mainly for transparency.
If you can silence one person you can silence anyone.
If you can silence anyone you can manipulate facts and by extension you can manipulate the truth.

If you look up Slavoj Zizek he often talks about censorship.
Each society has its own obligatory self censoring consciousness.

He claims that at the heart of each society is ideology.

The issue with free speech is it does not take into account culture.
Culture is integral part of who you are as a society.

Culture defines ethics, how you approach authority, how you associate with other members of society, how you judge good and bad and how you define values.

Unfortunately politicians and by extension companies know how to cater to masses homeopathic-ally micro-dosing truth that only benefits them.

The logic is if it benefits them it benefits you.

 

[onesteptwostep]

• Do you think followers of such influencers are responsible for the grave things that they commit in the name of being influenced? And if yes, to what extent?
• Do you think a popular person deservers flak for their past behaviours which are irrelevant in contemporary times?
• Is it hypocritical to harshly judge such a person just because they are popular? If no, how do you justify your answer for the bullet point above this one?

1) Of course, just because they were influnced to do something doesn't mean it voids their personal responsibility. Just because Hitler made you kill lots of people doesn't mean you can get away with it. Hitler will be prosecuted and so will you.

2) Of course not? If it's irrelevant then it's irrelevant. If it's something that's controversial then people need to come to a societal consensus.

3) It's not hypocritial, but rather, selective. The issue with harsh judgements is that there are hundreds upon hundreds of people having differing judgements about you. The ones which pass on the harshest judgements will come to fore and be controversial just as much as the act which sparked the outrage in the first place. The judgement which the perpetrator accepts is the one which he or she responds to, the harshest judgement is not the judgement the perpetrator has to necessarily accept. One has to remind oneself that the judge can also come into judgement as well. (Unless if we're talking about God.)

 

[Cognisant]

It’s important to understand the role of governance, consider the tragedy of the commons, for the most part people are able to regulate their own and each other’s behaviour on an individual basis but as the number of people increases the ability of each person to affect that regulation is diminished and end the result is an anarchic free-for-all. The super majority may be willing to follow unwritten rules but in a city of a million people if only 0.01% are behaving selfishly that’s still 10,000 people, if 10,000 litter every day the city will soon be awash with garbage, worse this selfish behaviour can motivate others to behave selfishly.

The use of CFCs as refrigerants was common practice until they were widely banned, the refrigerator manufacturers knew they were harmful for the environment but it was a cost effective solution, without regulatory intervention none of them could have discontinued the practice for fear of putting their business at a disadvantage. Unfortunately the regulators themselves also need to be regulated or else instead of regulating the market for the benefit of the market and the people who depend upon it they bias the market in favour of those individuals/businesses that offer benefits to themselves. Therein is the inherent problem with democratic governance, beyond a certain scale individuals within the system are unable to regulate each other’s behaviour and those that are corrupt have a corrupting influence, especially given the inherently competitive nature of politics.

Now relating this back to social media and cancel culture, I see it as a matter of regulating influence, without regulation there’s anarchy and selfishness begets selfishness, so there needs to be some degree of regulation but that always comes at the expense of the potential for corruption. Perhaps the solution is small governance, for example this forum is small enough that it can be managed by a number of people who as individuals are able to effectively regulate each other’s behaviour, and I think that works pretty well. However INTPforum is not Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter or whatever the young’uns are using these days and even on Reddit where it’s divided up into forum sized subreddits there’s influencers and drama and people bullying/trolling each other.

Using Reddit for example I think its fine for subreddits to be biased, each having its own topic and/or culture and the onus is on the people participating in those communities to understand the nature of the community, i.e. don’t expect bipartisan political discourse from r/Marxism. However it would not be acceptable for Reddit as a service provider to censor or otherwise bias their platform, not unless the user uploaded content threatens the platform itself in some way.

So whether or not an influencer should be held accountable depends upon the nature of the platform they influence on, like how you wouldn't hold your grandmother responsible for bad medical advice like you would a doctor, with your grandmother the onus is on you to have realistic expectations, whereas with a doctor the onus is on him/her to be a professional and know what they're talking about.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I know this is not about cancel culture, but I think the whole cancel culture is a deeper problem.

Many doctors say antivax people spread misinformation.
The issue is many antivaxers ARE fucking doctors with PHD and whatnot.
There are literally scientists who have controversial views.
There are doctors who administer ivermectine literally world wide.

Trump went on TV and said something so dumb that I still don't know what he meant.

People drank bleach due to social media.

There are doctors pro restrictions and doctors against.

One epidemiologist went on TV and said this virus is just a flu, prior analysis mind you so even if she was right there was no fucking way in hell she could know what the virus does.

I don't think cancel culture is something new either. I think its a new name for something very old and that is mass hysteria.

Remember the world buying out toilette paper? I have zero clue why that even happened since there was never a single shortage of toilette paper and best part no commercials either.
Its not like they were selling 10 ply paper with unicorn saffron antiallergy sent.

Mass hysteria is a big problem.

One rule is fear makes people do stupid things and make very short sighted decisions.

This is given physiologically.

 

[dr froyd]

social media in this context has some fundamental issues which don't really admit any solutions. By its very nature it is an environment where social validation is the primary currency, and as such it will ruthlessly promote consensus opinions and sentiments at the expense of any counter-mainstream ideas. Phenomena like virtue signalling, moral outrage at political incorrectness, shaming of minority opinions, etc, thus become the predominant modes on these platforms. Moreover the platforms are for-profit businesses, which further enhances these effects since their executives know they have to enforce whatever rules are imposed by the majority. Thus they are pressured to regulate, as OP says, certain types of discourse on their platforms - but not because the discourse itself is somehow wrong but rather because it falls outside consensus.

 

[Riiscup]

No, with great popularity does not come great responsibility. You should not be held responsible for what your fans do unless you specifically asked the dummy, that you know will do whatever you say, to do whatever the bad thing is. And you know who the dummies are. People need to stop being followers and then passing blame when they do stupid shit.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Popularity is not equal or same as quality.
This is why pop music plays on radio, but very few people go out of their way to rush to a concert where some spectacle ghost fake sings and performs.
Pop music however became higher art through sheer amount of popularity and diversity.
Simply so many produce it and selectively some good bands over years emerged and got popular.

That being said what people like and is popular is often the worst.
Alcohol, Cigarettes, Social media, Stupid shows, TV etc.

Social media exploit human psychology to the max.

Everyone wants to interact, everyone wants to see what others are doing from time to time, everyone wants to be cool, interesting, etc.

There is multiple motivations from vanity to bonding rituals and plain and simple socializing that promotes people to check in social media.

Trouble is social media platforms are not for education or promoting facts, they are there to promote human bias.

Mis information for example spreads easily given that same people tend to cluster in social media, and what is even more

The trouble with stupid ideas is the stupid ideas that sound the best get promoted on these platforms.

Since stupidity is much easier thing to do than smart in general, social media are biased by design for stupid stuff.

I am pretty sure creators of the social media are full aware of this.

This also means social movements that exist on social media can be pretty chaotic, random, and have a very surface level commercial appeal to them rather than be an organized well thought out structure.

Most social movements are spontaneous anyway.

But facebook makes it so easy for people to come together and just do it, that the vetting process and the whole idea behind the movement can be build up from ground up in matter of days and be completely stupid.

Worst part about mis information is that intelligent people are as susceptible to it as dumb people.
The part where intelligent people think they can actually filter out the nonsense on social media is the part that makes intelligent people more vulnerable towards stupid stuff.