The Weight of Words: Our Digital Power
With our newly afforded digital prowess, - and power - is it time to finally take it seriously?
Monday 9th January 2023
Online discourse, particularly over the last five years, has taken shape as an overriding news source, stream of consciousness, entertainment hub, and political playground all rolled into one. Where this new frontier of fact-check-less news and think-pieces has emerged, we carry the burden of often having no clue who the brains behind these sentiments are.
There is an inescapable myth of omniscience online. A trick in the psyche which lets us believe that all we can and will ever need to know is available through handheld devices void of conversation, debate, or further questions. Each of us have been allocated some fraction of power with no instructions on how to utilise it (for good, for bad, for fun). This power is a strange scale; it feels incredibly individual but can be drowned out with something as simple as a ‘comments off’ switch, bringing any criticism to a standstill and sealing the potential of discussion clean shut.
Now let’s imagine a roundtable. You’ve taken your seat and are engaged in a discussion. As a semblance of online culture, you could look around and see faceless figures offering their opinions. Their anonymity is strange but who are you to judge when you’re free to benefit from that same namelessness yourself. But then the faces of your peers start to gradually come into view. To your right is an academic scholar, directly across from you sits a teenage boy (I use ‘teenage’ lightly, he can’t be older than thirteen), and to your left a B list celebrity famed for their good looks. As faceless figures their words carry the same weight, and we can’t engage in prejudice beyond our perception of their format and syntax when writing. Now that they’re out in the open it’s easier to distinguish who may be trustworthy, but factor in academia, professionalism, or simply aesthetic appeal, the field is slightly more complicated.
It’s a strange thing to understand how the casual conversations that we hold in person scarcely leave the walls within which they are created, but that same conversation as typed letters rather than spoken word can take on a life of its own. A month could go by, the exchange entirely out of your mind but as soon as you open a social media platform, there it is again. There’s a permanence in what we say despite how well equipped we are to say it.
But how hard did people have to work to ‘project’ their voices pre-internet? We should be no stranger to the fact that first impressions count, and have historically counted with regard to the way that each of us look. Whilst the general ethos of every person having something of value to bring to the table may be true in that earlier mentioned anonymous roundtable, the reality of face-to-face interactions is that race, gender, and appearance have more stock in this debate than words ever could.
Now, in 2023, we bring the word ‘influencer’ into the equation. Yes, the role that we’ve come to know an influencer to hold may initially seem fairly surface level - makeup, clothes, brand partnerships - however there has been an unassuming shift in recent years as their job description has been silently updated to play a much more significant part in cultural and social discussions (and they’re paid for it, too). So who are we entrusting with this responsibility? An Insider piece wrote that - to no surprise - Black influencers make significantly less money than their White counterparts. We know this, companies know this, social media catalyses this, but time again we see the weight of White creators’ media presence trump that of their Black peers. Something that I’ve gotten into the habit of doing recently is nosily checking follower counts when I come across new creators on my TikTok for you page; I’ve never realised just how many users have high follower counts. It seems baseline nowadays that the path to influencing is more simple than it once was, but Black, Asian, and Indigenous creators have reached large milestones in terms of follower count and engagement and are never pushed into the mainstream unless connected to some sort of scandal or controversy. Influencers will, no doubt, lose their partnerships over ill-received hot takes and ‘cancellable’ scandals, but the ones carrying the core of heavy social discussions on their back are not being credited the same way their counterparts are being reprimanded. If you can see the problem, why not place more time and money into the solution? In a culture which has quotes from theorists and 20th century journalists at the ready, there seems to be a resistance to putting those observations into practice 50 years on.
Reading something online can be taken as gospel in the modern day, where one person’s words can hold the weight of omniscience, and sway the knowledge of a million people. But in truth, we don’t know where those words came from, we don’t know the extent of their validity, and for some reason we don’t seem to think that this matters. In a world where a person’s art may be overshadowed by the opinions held of them on the internet, it begs the question: how easily influenced are we by people we can’t even put faces or surnames to? Comments often made without second thought will make our morals crumble under the power of a high follower count, and forfeiting this anonymity can’t seem appealing when there are real consequences to face in the aftermath. True legal or medical advice, alongside other professionals in their respective fields, are often forgotten and replaced with the supposed ‘tips-and-tricks’ advice format given in 30-second increments. Whilst some of this advice is well-founded, the disregard for people who have spent years working or researching in the fields which grant them access to these sorts of conclusions is an interesting byproduct of internet culture in recent years.
It’s difficult to decide whether or not this constant stream of information online translates in any literal capacity into the ‘real world’. We’ve seen disappointment take hold over election results where the favoured candidate within the walls of social media perhaps falls significantly short of expectations, but also the consequences of digital hatred as it makes its way into real-life discourse. 2022 saw misogyny transform from offensive vitriol to a tool used for internet growth; namely the phenomenon that creator Andrew Tate carried behind him and his videos. Despite being in the public eye for well over a decade, the new audience that platforms such as TikTok has put up for grabs offers a malleable mindset brought up in a generation which has been raised by social media, and takes much of what they see online as fact. But nobody has taught them differently. The aftermath of Tate’s commentary - typically his views rooted in traditional gender roles and reinforcement of the idea that men are ideologically above women - has seen real life consequences perhaps unexpected when placed amongst the efforts of those fighting for matters of social justice and utilising the internet as a hopeful catalyst.
Popular media outlet ‘Shit You Should Care About’ had a New Zealand based teacher write to them in August following the rising reach of Andrew Tate about their experience having to deal with the fallout of Tate’s influence in their all-boys school. They explained that a majority of the students are “obsessed” with him and are beginning to believe that success is “synonymous with abusing women”, even overhearing conversations pertaining to sexual assault where the consensus amongst the boys was that women who were assaulted were “asking for it due to what they wear”. The boys are between the ages of 13 and 15.
You can put it down to charisma or personality, but the truth in this matter is that deep-rooted oppressive views will always take precedence in their ease of slipping back into the general narratives than more justified, more fair conversations ever can. Tate didn’t even have to create his own TikTok page for his opinions to take hold of an impressionable generation, whereas there are individuals dedicated to reversing this damage whose work is instantly undermined when rivalled by ‘traditional’ perspectives. ‘Traditional’, in most cases’ masking overt misogyny, homophobia, or racism (or all).
Long has the role of media in society (typically printed media such as newspapers) been the deciding factor in public opinion, but the globalisation provided by the internet and our international connections allows this media - false or factual - to travel the globe before the work day comes to an end. There are certainly some views that can find their place in outside society more comfortably than others.
On the flip side, the power wielded by our digital personalities may provide ample opportunity for people who may have previously slipped between the cracks of mainstream media to share their views without needing to solidify any journalistic career prior or post. Sites with ‘infinite scrolling’ such as TikTok, Twitter, and (sometimes) Instagram somewhat force this discourse into our daily rounds, woven amongst the lighthearted entertainment and personalised feeds. The universality of social media allows for access which is socially unacceptable in in-person encounters: the ability to place yourself in front of somebody unannounced and tell them what you think. But again, is there a relevance that this holds outside of our screens? Our online protests often aren’t circled with the same red pen of controversy as picket lines are and it may be a nod towards what people generally consider credible forms of protest and what they don’t.
Where the internet is certainly beneficial, however, is mobilisation. It is disruptive in new ways. COVID-19 and our time in quarantine strengthened social media as a means to keep us connected and the injustices that sparked movements in this time - the 2020 murder of George Floyd in the US, and Sarah Everard in the UK in 2021 - were undoubtedly exacerbated by their visibility online. Drawing a light to these issues which have plagued each country for long before, brought an overdue magnifying glass to the institutions that allowed the crimes to happen in the first place. Organisations and movements popped up overnight and the streets were flooded, offering a hopeful path. The main question now is whether that same outrage has prevailed, or whether the light has since dimmed.
Circling back to the element of the ‘infinite scroll’, we should be considering just how much new content we are able to take in per day. Even the most socially aware, 21st-century curated feed would have its user hitting a wall at some point, and with an average of 87 minutes being spent on TikTok per day, I would assume that that wall comes up fairly early. With this we should ask ourselves, are these new platforms too fast-paced to maintain the sociopolitical narratives that they begin? It is, of course, a positive and welcome shift that political conversations are being made digestible enough for an audience differing in experience and knowledge of the political sphere, but this is perhaps overtaken by the pressure to get new information out as quickly as possible.
There is something incredibly personable about connections made via social media. With such a plethora of personalities to align yourself with, the digital sphere can provide a confidante, a shoulder to cry on, or an outlet to your rage. It’s easy to forget that it truly is forever and the internet is unforgiving. Mistakes made ‘irl’ (in real life) are much more easily forgotten when there isn’t somebody prepared at all times to bring your past words into the public arena armed with a timestamp. Not to say that this is a bad thing, the foundation of this piece is the fact that we never really know who we’re listening to online, but should there be limits to this? Is there an expiry date or statute of limitations? Or should we believe that a person’s character is built up over time and therefore their words of the past only add to what we know of them in the present? There are equal levels of “people can change” and “people can’t change that much”, which lets us question how tightly people should be expected to monitor their past behaviour whilst it invisibly trails behind them. Are some career paths defunct when challenged with youth-led wrongdoings, and are these simply the measures we should be taking to ensure that the voices leading social media discourse have a past which is morally deserved of the following that they have amassed.
On top of this discussion is the overarching question of consequence. Where do the repercussions of this inequity show up in real life? The simple conclusion is that online platforms and communities have very much replaced a number of elements that our traditional education systems once had, and even filled gaps where our classrooms have been lacking. From young children to the elderly, we’d be naive to assume that people take what they see online as simply a product of online culture and the accessibility to share without consequence. We’re all learning, constantly. The internet has become an institution of education and we should treat it as such, with each of us as its faceless students.
By Amelia Defeo.
