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checkeredcat · 4 years

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Cancel Culture: Is it fair?

Project description:

Being in quarantine has definitely increased the amount of time I personally spend on social media. I tried to read, try to exercise, but ultimately I end up on Instagram or TikTok. I’ve also been posting more for the sake of it, but I realised this comes with its’ problems. The more content you put out, the more you are sharing about yourself and your opinions, which everyone might not agree with. This got me thinking about celebrities and influencers. Their every post and opinion is being scrutinised by thousands and sometimes millions of people. Alongside this, came the development of ‘Cancel Culture’. The best definition I could find for this comes from an article by Aja Romano (2019). She writes, “Cancel culture, describes a form of boycott in which someone (usually a celebrity) who has shared a questionable or unpopular opinion, or has had behaviour that is perceived to be problematic, is called out on social media”. My project will look to understand this ‘cancel culture’ more deeply whilst uncovering the dangers of the internet due to regulations, or a lack of.

Method:

The most useful method I could use to investigate ‘cancel culture’ would be a visual discourse analysis. A discourse analysis is a qualitative research method that examines the organisation of language and images. As discussed by Van Dijk (1997), any type of discourse analysis must seek to explain who, why, how and where language is being used. What I understood from this is that there is much more behind a picture or caption which is left for the audience to interpret. To conduct a successful visual discourse analysis, one would have to interpret a deeper meaning beyond the surface of a post. A caption alongside a photo is also something to break down and analyse because it is usually used to add more meaning to a photograph. Daymon and Holloway (2002) suggest that researchers who use a discourse analysis must look at three things in specific. One is the form and content of the language used, essentially what the caption means. Another is the way people use language to communicate ideas and beliefs, meaning what they want their audience to think after seeing their post. Finally, the third one is any institutional or organisational factors which may affect the way language is being used. Therefore, in order to thoroughly conduct a discourse analysis you must make sure those three stems are accounted for. I will conduct my qualitative research by collecting data from Instagram and TikToks of five celebrities who have been ‘cancelled’ for something in the last three years. I will be screenshooting information on their posts (pictures, captions and comments) and then create a coding system of similarities across the three scenarios. This will ensure that I can pick out patterns and reoccurring themes across the three events.

Discussion:

Social networking sites can be said to alter the sense of what it means to be an individual. I believe that on social media, people usually present versions of themselves that are different or ‘better’ in their eyes to their actual self. This means people may occasionally fall into the trap of posting things they do not actually believe, in order to keep a certain image of themselves alive. With controversial posts, inevitably comes controversial backlash and hate. Nakamura and Chow-White (2013) also note that this hate is propagated via different platforms. For example, Nessa Barrett is a seventeen year old TikTok star who was recently ‘cancelled’ because she posted a video dancing inappropriately to a Quran recitation. People are understandably disgusted by what she had done and went from her TikTok to her Instagram to comment their thoughts. This is an example of what Nakamura and Chow-White were explaining. However, this so called ‘cancelled culture’ may just be more apparent to us in today’s society because there are platforms to easily share your views on. It is not necessarily that society has become more sensitive, it is purely that there is now an easy way to share your view/hate on something. This is supported by Murthy and Sharma (2018). There is a problem when it comes to theorising online antagonisms. They identify that although online hate does seem to be increasing dramatically, this may reflect a change in the way we are communicating rather than an increase in the amount of hate taking place.

Over 90 million instagram posts are made in one day. Out of this unfathomable number, can you imagine how many people experience online hate because it is so easy? The internet is clearly being regulated and watched. Situations such as Cambridge Analytica where Facebook was wrongly using peoples data exposes social networking sites as trackers of our data. If they have ultimate control over social media, why do they allow such hate to continue? If they know a post is bound to bring general upset and cause offence then they should also not allow the post to be uploaded in the first place. In addition, after an offensive post is uploaded, they should be able to limit the amount of hateful comments said to someone. After reading a revised edition of Foucualt’s (1977) work, it is clear that he warns of the ‘hierarchal observation’ we are under as humans. As societies have grown and changed, the ways in which we are ‘observed’ has changed. We are now being observed by our activities online and our digital footprints. The surveillance we are under seems to only be used at the benefit of the government rather than for the protection of our mental healths. Nessa Barrett is a seventeen year old girl. Although I do not agree with what she did, the hundreds of death threats she received would be too much for anyone to handle. In this situation, I do believe that Instagram and TikTok should have at least temporarily disabled or limited her account to people. If our content is being surveilled, it makes no sense to why posts like this are able to be uploaded in the first place. I argue that the regulation of social media is weak and this leads to an inevitable cancelling culture.

Contribution:

As mentioned earlier, I undertook a visual discourse analysis of five celebrity instances which demonstrate ‘cancel culture’. The first one was of Nessa Barrett’s comment section after dancing to the Quran and then making a public apology saying she did not know what she was dancing to. The post was obviously deleted but people still commented on all of her other content to express themselves. One comment that stood out in particular was “Filthy rat. You should not be on this earth.” It would be almost impossible for Nessa to block every person who left a hate comment and there were many more like these. Another celebrity who was cancelled in 2018 was Logan Paul. Whilst visiting a Japanese suicide forest, Logan Paul filmed a dead body whilst vlogging for his Youtube channel. This also caused outrage on Instagram and Twitter as it was trending for 3 days. Most of his comments read “That should be you lying there dead.” I accumulated some of the worst comments I saw across five situations like these, and identified the pattern that usually when a group of people like a religion or culture feel attacked by a post, the ‘cancel culture’ is heightened. Death threats are entirely too common on these posts which worries me because influencers are usually young and impressionable. This is dangerous and the internet should do a better job at regulating these comments. I think it is fair for people to stop watching your content if you have offended them, but I argue that trolls who send death threats are just as bad. Online culture has become so hateful nowadays simply due to the fact that we do not see the consequences of our actions. My findings of the visual analysis were shocking because seeing the amount of people so comfortable telling someone to “kill yourself” online was disturbing. Cancel culture is definitely concerning for society because it exists to drive hate against one person at a time until someone else makes a mistake.

Whilst I do not agree with cancel culture, I do not think it has a direct impact for long. For example, both Nessa Barrett and Logan Paul still have over one million followers online. If people were really ‘boycotting’ their content, their following would have dramatically decreased. The fact that people still follow them after supposedly being disgusted by them emphasises how ‘cancel culture’ does not actually lead to people being “cancelled” completely, but rather “cancelled” until there is someone else to hate on. Then again, once something is on the internet, it is very difficult to have it fully erased forever, so your mistakes might come back to haunt you again one day. This is also unfair, because people may drag up your past after you have grown and changed. Do we deserved to be cancelled over something we immaturely posted 10 years ago?

#cancelled

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