It’s not Cancel Culture, it’s Cancel Technology
Social ostracism is as old as the hills. Social media is not.
“Cancel Culture” is a trendy new term for social ostracism. As anyone who either was alive before 2010 or has read a book about the period will remember, people got socially ostracized all the time before Twitter and Facebook and Google existed. The things they got ostracized for have changed over the years — maybe before it was cheating on your husband, or saying you didn’t believe in God, or being disabled, or being a communist, or whatever. Ostracism is a consistent feature of human societies, and relabeling it “Cancel Culture” is fine with me I suppose.
The really interesting question is whether ostracism has changed in important and substantial ways in the age of social media and the internet. Even if human nature doesn’t change over time (and I think the jury is still out on that one), the tools we have access to do change, and that allows society to reshape itself in new ways. (That’s what I mean when I semi-ironically call myself a “technological determinist”, by the way.)
What does the internet do? Lots of stuff, but the two things I want to focus on here are distribution and memory. The internet:
- allows a very very large number of strangers to see what you say and do, and
- keeps a record of most of the things you say and do online.
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Πηγή: noahpinion.substack.com
