cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47679815
Have you guys seen stuff like that? People talking about drama and such being “huge news for the unemployed” and such.
On one hand, I think it’s a little bit funny. As a serial unemployed person myself, I have to assume that many - shall I wager, most? - of the unemployed aren’t actually spending all their time browsing the internet looking for niche micro-celebrity wannabe influencer drama to rot over, but I think the expression is moreso making light of people that are leeching off of others for no good reason and choose to spend their time dragging their crummy eyes over Twitter threads in hopes of finding a crumb of dirt to write a mean comment about some online nobody in a comment section. Which makes it funny!
On the other hand, however, I feel like it can be used to dismiss serious issues. For example, sometimes meaningful change is being discussed - such as the SKG initiative - by influencers, and drama surrounding that will be dismissed out of hand with the phrase, when indeed it isn’t just mindless drama, but rather a valid and reasonable discussion about the subject - even if perhaps presented in less-than-credible ways by less-than-reputable individuals, but I digress.
It reminds me of the “it’s not that deep” sentiment. It’s anti-intellectualism, it’s dismissive of real analysis, discussion, and thought. Whatever thing happening can be called “huge news for the unemployed” and dismissed, and meaningful discussion can easily be derailed by being slapped with the seal of drool by the shadow of social faux pas. In other words, if you call anything you don’t care about “cringe,” anything you do care about can be called the same in turn, and then nobody cares about anything because caring becomes, itself, cringe.
Recently, I’ve been watching quite a few videos of people talking about influencers. Frankly, I’m shocked. My brother says this is to be expected - influencers should be expected to be narcissistic weirdos - but I find the idea that these people are so often despicable. I mean, I’ve heard some absurd shit from the mouths of some pretty big creators online, it’s kind of wild.
Maybe it is for the better that parents should keep their kids away from the internet until they’re, well, I don’t know. I remember getting my first phone and it was a brick, a Nokia brick. I played snake on it. I played Red Faction on LAN with my friends. Maybe that was good, is all I’m saying. Maybe kids shouldn’t be exposed to streamers and content creators, because it does seem that an alarming number of them is absolutely vile.
I can craft so many counter-arguments to this by the way, I could write quite a bit about this, but really, I just think there’s not much of a point to it. How big of a deal is being on the internet at 12, these days? Maybe that would be keeping children from a huge component of social life… Or would entertaining a child with books and movies and such be OK? The world is constantly changing.
Ah, I don’t feel like writing all my thoughts but I have so much inside my head right now… I just hope I managed to put enough of what I’m thinking into this post that whoever ends up reading this actually understands where I’m trying to get at.