I found it that taking Mass Media Theory at the same time of this class very enlightening. If I took it separately I wouldn’t have connected how the ideas work in conjunction to understand how the flow of information doesn’t work the same for all populations. The theory of mediatization crossed with McLuhanism is a scary possibility. Social media seems to be dictated on “the medium is the message,” the hyperbolic intensity of Twitter is a perfect example. Since the messages are short, they must inspire emotional thoughts in order to deliver a message that will be shared. This sharing happens at an exponential rate and perpetuated by how the algorithms connect content. “Twitter users favor negativity and aggressiveness, which is not surprising since “negative sentiment” is the key to popularity on Twitter (Thelwall, Buckley, & Paltoglou, 2011, p. 415). In other words, hate follows tweets faster than neutral ones.
While exploring this idea in this class, I found a workaround when trying to understand people who are not like me, BlackPeopleTwitter. BlackTwitter was developed to aggregate real people’s ideas on what it is like to be Black in America. According to their rules on Reddit, the “sub is intended for exceptionally hilarious and insightful social media posts made by black people.” It doesn’t allow corporations or media companies to post, only allowing individual perspectives.
I don’t have any Black friends, to be fair I only really have two people I consider friends, but that is not really a good excuse to not know how 20% of the population sees the world. By signing up for this, and several others like it that include groups that I don’t belong to, I can start to bypass the hyperbolic nature of the algorithms and start to understand the world from a variety of different perspectives. It is a band-aid to-be-sure, if I ever do get out of the house I will at least have the vocabulary and understanding and know where my naivety comes from, so I will be open up to people in a new way. I don’t care if it reeks of virtue signaling, what else am I to do? The polarization of social media is toxic in itself, this seems like a start.
Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., & Paltoglou, G. (2011). Sentiment in Twitter events. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(2), 406–18. doi: 10.1002/asi.21462 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®],