I am so very, very far behind on posting, and I suspect some of the posts I thought I would get to will most likely be abandoned. But I did say I would post a bit on the internet and humour.
Now obviously there are a lot of very amusing things on the internet, though I would say that snarky comments generally seem to succeed the best. And generally comments with a bit of bite and even a malicious edge.
As a general rule, I would say that irony doesn't translate particularly well to the internet and to Twitter in particular. I suppose this is largely because things written in shorthand (more or less) lose their context and can really come across badly when standing on their own. Perhaps it goes without saying that nuanced political commentary also fares badly on the internet...
I put in a joke in one of my recent scripts about how after Aunt Jemima was taken out of the grocery stores that Mrs. Butterworth had to watch her back. Now this was supposed to kind of point out the tone-deafness of the character. It didn't actually surprise me that there were calls to get rid of Mrs. Butterworth and Uncle Ben (and Uncle Ben is definitely on the way out). Now what was a surprise is that on LinkedIn someone was saying that 10 or so years ago, a Black-led focus group (run by a Black-owned firm) found that most consumers wanted to keep Uncle Ben, as he was seen as a competent authority figure featured on the box and not some Uncle Tom sell-out as a number of activists see him today.
I'm not saying either group is right, as both have their right to their opinion (though often one side claims the other doesn't have that right), but I do hate how Twitter just magnifies the voice of the angry few (and somebody is angry over literally everything (particularly the widespread misuse of literally)) and then corporations just cower and do their spineless thing. I guess I am really showing my age, but the concept of the silent majority that Nixon invoked really does seem to be something that maybe we should keep in mind.
I swore that I wasn't going to get into the whole trans rights advocacy buzzsaw and their battle against the TERFs, but I frankly am glad that J.K. Rowling is sticking to her guns and that, whenever the opportunity arises, Rowling's fans are still going out and buying her new books or what have you. Obviously, I am also against cancel culture as a general concept. (And how pathetic that a couple of the signers of this no cancel culture manifesto backed off when they disagreed with the positions of a few other signers!) And certainly it comes as no surprise that some people continue to play the victim card and claim that some speech is so damaging to them that it really should be suppressed. It is to my regret that I did participate in promoting the PC agenda while in university. I feel mostly we were simply promoting non-sexist language, and I still support that as a general goal, but the obnoxious self-righteousness that went along with the movement back then has morphed into a truly toxic brew amongst the Twitterati today.
I'll just end with a glaring example of what I consider a truly sad state of affairs showing just how humourless the internet is nowadays, and then perhaps I can finally move on to hopefully more light-hearted posts. There was a Canadian brewery that came up with a sour cherry beer called Karen Sour with the tag line "Can We Speak to Your Manager" (presumably to find the beer in stock)
And then a bunch of Twitter users said that this was mean spirited and because of the way that other Karens were making Black Lives miserable that this was the wrong time for the campaign. I truly can't fathom that anyone would think the brewery was actually celebrating Karens, but whatevs. The brewery instantly pulled the beer and grovelled about how unWoke they were, and the Internet moved on. But the world is just a bit more mirthless than it was before. Sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment