A few days ago a reader sent me a link to this Twitter thread on “The Lord of the Flies Theory of Millennials” and it’s blowing my mind. The basic premise is that generations of children (now young adults) have grown up in an environment without adult guidance, where power is gained through means that are unrecognisable to normal society, and where the punishment for non-conformity is incredibly severe.
"And I would argue that 'social media' isn't any more social than television is." I'm so old I remember when there was ONLY television. Three networks. The entire country glued to the "boob tube." Parents worried about the plug-in drug.
But if you couldn't bear a celebrity, or even non-celebrity, female on the Tonight Show and you wanted to abuse her profanely and even threaten to rape or kill her and to reveal her address and phone number to countless numbers of other unhinged zanies, your options were to call the switchboard at NBC and hold the phone forever, only to be hung up on ten seconds into your rant, or you could write a letter to the woman c/o The Tonight Show, New York, NY. You were able to reach one or two people that way.
A difference in degree is a difference in kind. The speed and immediacy, combined with the anonymity, of social media has put us on a whole new playing field. Almost nothing about television was social, excepting the interchanges with the small number of people in the same room watching it with you. Social media is nothing BUT social.
"A difference in degree is a difference in kind. The speed and immediacy, combined with the anonymity, of social media has put us on a whole new playing field."
Absolutely. The scale of that difference can't be overstated. And more, it's such an all-consuming environment that people literally grow up in it.
TV was at home, and available for a few hours a day. Social media is everywhere. And is pinging people 24/7. And as well as giving you instant access to celebrities and whoever else you'd like to direct your ire at, as well as the algorithmic outrage it curates for you, it has the ability to punish you if you say something you're not supposed to. Or, increasingly, if you don't say the thing you're *supposed* to be saying loudly and stridently enough.
To whit, I was banned from Medium and from a nice thousand a month plus another half that in bonuses, for stating the uncontroversial fact that a "trans" woman is biologically male.
Wondering how long until inclusiveness requires no disagreement with geocentrism.
"Or, increasingly, if you don't say the thing you're *supposed* to be saying loudly and stridently enough."
Found on the web, In our society, a man can say he's a woman, and was "born this way," but a man who says he wants to be traditionally masculine is "conditioned by society" and "toxic."
Don't underestimate the negative impact of television. It did more to isolate people from one another (and from debate) than anything before it. No more newsreels at the movie theatre with your neighbors; instead people sat alone in front of a tray of fast food consuming entertainment.
Television was the beginning of the breakdown of democracy.
The isolation from one another is what worries me about avid social media consumers far more than anything they are "consuming".
Most people, in most cultures, at most times have far more in common with one another than not, and would be hesitant to pull the trigger or do other off the wall sh** if they had ever sat down beside them and broken bread.
I grew up without TV, so I don't understand its pull, nor do I understand the attraction to gaming or Facebook or any of that stuff. What I do know is that the addiction is real, the replacement of real connections and relationships with virtual ones is unspeakably dangerous and destructive, on par with fentanyl or meth, but just less immediately obvious.
Salvation, such as it is or will be, must be clawed back one human interaction at a time. When I see even close family members glued to their phones during dinner, unable to let 60 seconds go by without scrolling through something, I teeter on the brink of despair....
Over here you'll see twenty teens at a restaurant, and nobody is talking to anyone else, they're all smiling at their phones. Even with terrific food.
If I had any family left and they were texting during dinner I would make a scene. "Put. That. Away." But I'm ... "Now."
The main attraction Facebook has for me is staying in touch with people on the other side of the world, most of whom I am unlikely to see again (I live in Vietnam). And that is 90% on the messenger application; I write very little on FB itself. No TV for forty years. I was away from it for a month and when I tried to watch something I couldn't stand it.
Egregious hijack: we went out to eat at "Chicken Plus" which is easy to figure out is a Korean franchise; the tiny salad bar includes dried seaweed, which is no more Vietnamese than salad bars; the CEO is grandfather Park and Park is a Korean name. Korean is for Vietnam what Italian is for America: the second cuisine. Even rural people who won't eat Vietnamese sandwiches will eat Korean.
The chicken is inexpressibly delicious. Just wow.
Almost nothing is open right now, Lunar New Year, but this place was.
Korean BBQ is just indescribably good. I've passed through Korea on layovers but never stayed long, only ate the complimentary hotel buffet. But the food on the planes is just amazing, I remember a few ... bibimbap, ssambas (yes two S at the beginning), a few others.
Funny thing is that it doesn't taste at all like Vietnamese but they're crazy about it.
Since I've never owned a television, I'm not objecting to your statement. But it wasn't toxic to the same degree that social media has become. Of course, the basic problem is the Homo sapiens is toxic. But that's another, albeit related, subject.
Well, television was preceded by radio. Or one could blame the telephone. What about the telegraph? I've often thought that Gutenberg really has a lot to answer for. Once people could read books by themselves, that was the beginning of the end of human community and the start of decadence and the end of empire. I've concluded that no single technology is to blame for this development. It's human nature that is to blame.
That is facile. The telephone enabled communication; television stifled it. Printing put knowledge into the hands of people who had been denied it; recording did the same for music.
What you're saying is as scrambled as "heroin and cocaine give people purpose."
Don't underestimate the contribution of 24-hour news, with the advent of CNN and an exponential increase in cable movie channels in the '80s. Before CNN, news came from half hour to one hour news shows in the morning and evening, and from the local newspaper, and the radio. If you wanted more news than that you subscribed to various magazines and periodicals. But the news WAS more balanced then, as the Fairness Doctrine was still in place, mandating equal time for political candidates, which Reagan got rid of because old-school conservative snowflakes were tired of having to listen to and present views outside their constipated bubble.
Because CNN had to fill 24 hours a day now with news, we got a lot more attention on the important stuff, but also a lot of stupid crap too, including people and stories which should never have been on the news. That was also the dawn of the beginnings of reality TV, like the live rescue of a little girl who'd fallen down a hole in the ground, and later, the OJ chase.
Nut groups like the KKK took advantage of this and created news with rallies & marches & so forth because they knew it would make the news. Whatever was outrageous and eye-catching leads. Or as Don Henley sang back then, "We all know that crap is king, give us your dirty laundry!"
Don't confuse the CNN of the modern entertainment network ("children with incurable disease and lost puppies" — Paddy Chayevsky) with it first few years. The erary years under Ted Turner were glorious. No just around the clock news but excellent commentary and interview shows; I watched Crossfire and Freeman Reports every day. Pat Buchanan was a brilliant interviewer and Lou Dobbs was the most professional anchorman ever, showing no trace of the bigotry that defines him now.
The Happy World of Entertainment shows were few, easily skipped, and only took up a small part of their day.
Needless to say, Things Went Bad, The Happy shows started taking more time, the commentary became shallower, Tom Braded got old and Fred Barnes took his place, then took Buchanan's. The rightward shift is more recent and by than television was long since out of my life.
The last decade would have been enormously different with the original CNN.
Wow. That Lord of the Flies thread is spot on. Why a generation of adults decided to bow to the whims of children is beyond me. It's not helpful for anyone, much in the way that giving a crying toddler cookies for dinner and saying they don't need to brush their teeth is ultimately a losing strategy.
It's amazing right?! Not just bowing to their whims, but pretty much allowing them to raise themselves. The idea that a five-year-old might not be competent to make decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives is sacrilege in certain circles now.
"Okay my friend, you win. Ideas, especially bad ideas, spread at exactly the same rate in the social media age as they did when the printing press was first invented. "
I love it when you reach the exasperation point and go sarcastic.
Oh dear god I had not seen that one. OK, another spoke on the great wheel of anti-intellectualism, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I've seen similar sentiments about progressive rock (Yes, ELP, Pulsar ...), the "whitest" rock, the least influence from hammer songs and Robert Johnson. Progressive rock is the only rock I still listen to, the blues influenced rock of my youth has little appeal now, and I wonder who decided that there is something missing in music without prominent black influence.
I'd die without classical music. Too call it "white supremacist" is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard all day, but it's only early afternoon.
"Oh dear god I had not seen that one. OK, another spoke on the great wheel of anti-intellectualism, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised."
Exactly. Brought to you by the same school of thought that banned the word "field" from USCs curriculum. Just virtue signallers desperately searching for new and more elaborate ways to signal their virtue.
Well, you could say they're just taking things to their logical conclusion. If Western European ideas were founded on colonialism and slavery, then everything that springs from them is poisoned. Our legal system has the concept of "the fruit of the poisoned tree" and so does current progressive "thinking", apparently. Which is ironic, if you take a step back. Mary Harrington's essay "How to Find Meaning When Everything is Power" delineates this very well: https://www.palladiummag.com/2020/03/26/how-to-find-meaning-when-everything-is-power/
"If even the hardest of hard sciences now advances a theory of reality that embrace radical uncertainty and the implication of the observer in what is observed"
Her grasp of physics is decades out of date. Google Wigner's Friend.
To analyze postmodernism for its flaws makes as much sense as analyzing Trump's strategy.
I'm one who enjoys and appreciates Americana, the blend of European melody and harmony with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms which in my opinion are more sophisticated. Culturally "white" European children learned rhythm via "Patty cake, Patty cake" rhythms which at least in the past, "black" children learned more polyrhythmic "Tom, Tom greedy gut" rhythms. I consider it to be a wonderful blend. Does that mean we should reject unblended music from various sources because of where it came from? What a horrible idea. When the record labels came up with the "race music" classification it was a curse.
You might check out Juno Reactor, the inventors of the genre psychedelic trance, in their first album "Transmissions," which I always listen to on a plane taking off. The opening track samples HAL 9000 saying "You're gonna have a wonderful trip" (echoes)
Heavy Afro-Cuban rhythms, very dark, darker with each release. Probably the dance-music distant relationship isn't your cuppa tea but they are the only techno-derived music I still listen to.
I can relate to his first comment. X-ists tend to wear a thicker veil when not behind a keyboard. Mike Tyson quote goes here. However <comma> the internet has a wide reach with low expense as you pointed out.
Music was previously king of spreading ideas because it is memorable, and people want to hear it. What internet article will be remembered and remain impactful for as many years as Dylan singing "Masters of War", "Blowing in the Wind" or Pete Seeger singing "We Shall Overcome" which became a civil rights anthem? But there's more. You can spew venom in a silo without a musician or poet's talent.
I'm old enough to remember short wave radio listening for variety of political propaganda which was always an artful blend of truth and lies when coming from government sources. The same skills are used at the source for what gets spread on the internet, but social media has the power of being spread by "friends" and "influencers". That power is very real. Especially because people want to participate. I'm participating right now.
"X-ists tend to wear a thicker veil when not behind a keyboard. "
Yeah, definitely. People are certainly "braver" when they don't have to stand behind their words with their face and name. But it's not the name-calling that's the issue. That's the least of the concerns as far as I'm concerned. It's the speed with which lies and bad information can spread and become absolutely, unquestionably true in the minds of some people.
Ten years ago, say, how many people do you think were seriously arguing that trans women are women? Not just that they should be thought of as women in most cases, or that the decent thing to do was treat them as they wished to be treated, but that they literally are women. Female even.
Today, a significant number of people, some in positions of power, genuinely believe this. Or, at least, are willing to go to their graves pretending that they do. We live in a different reality to the compulsively online. And it's not clear at all which side is going to win out.
Another instance of what I'm calling the Epistemological Crisis.
It's a lot worse than virtue signalling, which ultimately boils down to pretense, conformity, and conceit. If you've seen "What is a Woman" you can see how addled some of these people are.
This forum doesn't have pictures so right there 90% of the dumbest are repelled, and if it has emoji, I don't see them.
One thing I find really creepy is how invested so many people are in this social media junk. They care more about how many followers they have than about the quality of what they write. One woman on Twitter with many thousands had her account hacked and posted videos on another actually crying about it. With tears. Twitter is her life.
Since Musk started his dalliance with it, he's lost half his fortune. He neglects his real businesses to obsess over his Twitter image and has disgraced himself repeatedly, It's done him a lot of harm.
That people take their behavior cues from social media comes as no surprise to me, nor should it to you.
As long as I've been alive it's been obvious that people take their cues from television, which tells them how they are supposed to act. Since before my teens I have had vast contempt for this level of conformity and have called it "sposta," the colloquial pronunciation of "supposed to." And most of all from TV ads, which have to be upbeat and perky to Sell The Product. Manipulatively drawing people in.
Leading this charge is The Smile. The Smile is youthful, it's attractive, people will click a link to something otherwise uninteresting if the link is below Smile. In my high school there was a hallway of yearbook photos going back to the late 19th century. Up until around 1955 the expressions were serious, from solemn to engaging, and postures were vertical and facing the camera. Later you saw that broken neck with the elbow on the knee that has become the standard, with, yup, The Smile.
My uncle gave me some books from the middle of the last century by a satirist who went by the single name Osborne, and in one of them he talked about this. Reading it in my teens affected me deeply. The effect contributed to losing my job teaching because my students compained that I didn't smile all the time (I have minor facial paralysis and cannot smile except in reaction, not that I would if I could).
Vietnamese girls *are* instructed to smile all the time; one of my students kept a vapid expression on her face as I described a gang of kids on motorbikes kicking a little lost dog to death. The girl who sent me into motorbike tumble was beaming at the air like she had a 16oz Coke bottle in her. They make misogyny tempting.
I smile very rarely. I am not going to let TV ads tell me how I'm sposta behave.
Looking at ancestral family pictures 3+ generations back they all looked like Baptist ministers about to preach hell fire and damnation. The oldest picture with a smile is my maternal grandmother. A genuine unforced smile. She was a beauty.
Aside: I've been reminding people for years that "they" is plural; why do I have to do the same with "media?" Media is the plural of medium, where you originate your writing, Steve. What's next? "People is?" Not aimed at Steve, most people do this.
Repeat after me. Media are. Media are. Social media are. I mean, we aren't talking about complex declensions here (English doesn't have them) or reflexive verbs. We're talking about singular and plural.
There is no doubt that social media are harmful. They encourage hyperfactionalization. Yes, there was racial animus before Facebook but nothing validates a racist like seeing himself as part of a movement, something that was hard to maintain when racists had to be face to face with their fellow bigots and could see that they were a mob of losers.
Triviality reminder: there are almost no emotional controls online. You don't get facial expressions and you can shut out disagreement with a click (we all do it; no "they/them" in my browser). The MAGAts are on pages I never see and they don't see any caring sentiment.
The attempted insurrection on the Brazilian seat of government was organized on Facebook; TikTok is so aggressively shallow that unpopular kids commit suicide from it; Twitter is a cesspool of hate speech. It gave Trump a platform of stochastic assassination and his removal from it elevated dialog.
I got off Twitter a month ago; unable to find the willpower I did some posts I knew would get me banned. It was good for my emotional health.
There's probably no putting the genie back in the bottle but at least these media could be regulated.
That's possible, though I don't remember it. Still, every time I seee "media is" it's jarring all over again.
I was born like this; I was over three years old before I uttered my first words, and they were a sentence. Someone/they actually gives me a headache. Not as bad as cigarette smoke or Whitney Houston, but a headache.
I'll try not to be a pain in the ass but I've been called a grammar Nazi for calling out your for you're, which in my mind is subliterate.
"I'll try not to be a pain in the ass but I've been called a grammar Nazi for calling out your for you're, which in my mind is subliterate."
Haha, you'll find nothing but solidarity from me on this one. I feel a twinge of pain if autocorrect confuses "your" with "you're" in a text or some such. And yes, "media is..." wrong, but "social media is..." is correct. Sadly, English is hardly a model of consistency.
"And yes, "media is..." wrong, but "social media is..." is correct."
That makes zero sense. That's like saying "people" is plural but "crazy people" is singular.
And that definition is wrong. Social media are not uncountable, like water; "less people" drives me nuts, coming from people who would never say "fewer water." Partitivity is very important in Russian grammar. Social media are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. One, two, three.
Look, I'm not saying that we should take a snapshot of English and never allow any changes. There have been changes in my lifetime that I don't object to, like the unsilencing of the first c is Arctic. I've grown up thinking that the participle of "get" is "gotten" but it turns out that it's actually "got" as it still is in the Commonwealth, but too many people did a palin with "forget" and now "have gotten" has become standard. The Commonwealth spelling of gray no longer evokes a red squiggle in an American spellchecker. I can deal.
But putting an adjective in front of media doesn't change the word, it's just that most Americans are morons with language (and with chat conventions this is going to get a lot worse), they *never* think before speaking, they paint themselves into corners and then get out with awful grammar.
"If someone who wants to do better in school, uh, they should study harder"
a millisecond of forethought
"People who want to do better in school should study harder."
Maybe it's my aforementioned preoccupation with clean grammar, maybe it's learning Russian at 13 and four years of German in high school, maybe it's trying to avoid words likely to make me stutter. but I've been thinking before speaking all my life and if I have ever used the singular they it had to have been when my age was single digits.
And I absolutely do not subscribe to the idea that a majority making a mistake means it is no longer a mistake. I don't care if I end up as the last person on earth using "you're." I don't care if the Oxford dictionary says "they" is a gender neutral singular (I see no point in gender neutrality anyway); dictionaries are lists of definitions, not usage guides, and only the best of them mention that "ain't" is deprecated.
Yes, I know I am going to be annoyed the rest of my life.
"That makes zero sense. That's like saying "people" is plural but "crazy people" is singular."
No, it's like saying that "sheep" is singular and "sheep" is plural. Or that the plural of "opus" is "opera." As you say, expecting English grammar to make perfect sense is a recipe for a lifetime of annoyance.
And no, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are social media *companies*. Social media, as a concept, is uncountable. It's really an umbrella term for the various forms of electronic communication that have sprung up in the past 20 years or so.
Anyway, I'm not trying to convince you not to say "social media are..." just to not have an aneurism when somebody uses the perfectly fine "social media is...".
I don't see how the phrase under discussion could possibly be singular but going in circles isn't my thing."Social media usage" is uncountable, but I think we've worn this out.
When I see "opus" it's always as "op." Sheet music is part of my daily life.
English grammar is regular as Vietnamese (all SVO, even questions) compared to some others; in Spanish and Russian "like" is intransitive, "pizza is liked by/to me," and in Russian plural begins with five, not two. In Russian there are about six ducks that have to be set in their rows; in English there is only singular vs. plural and still most people can't handle it. I'd bet money that singularity of SM was a convention born of exasperation.
I'll try not to have an aneurism. Really.
In the past week I've seen "gratefulness" and "ferociousness" on Facebook and when I responded with "gratitude" and "ferocity" I got ferociousnessally yelled at.
My first serious langrage study was Russian at 13 with enormously complicated grammar, my most recent Vietnamese with the simplest there is (no pronouns, adverbs, conjugation, declension ...). Bad grammar is almost painful to me. Scratch "almost." I'm dual-verbal and I stopped trying to be relaxed about it a long time ago.
The way I see it, every word is a contract, and if people break the contract then we cannot bridge minds at all.
BTW since "social" is an adjective, "social media" isn't a compound noun. A compound noun is, z.B., "theme park" or "home work.," two or more nouns that together mean something specific.
In Vietnamese since the number of posssible words that don't violate spelling rules is very small, there are tons of compound words and often that make no sense taken individually.
"BTW since "social" is an adjective, "social media" isn't a compound noun. A compound noun is, z.B., "theme park" or "home work.," two or more nouns that together mean something specific."
Chris, you know you can just do a quick Google search before saying things like this, right? I never begrudge people being wrong. But being wrong with such confidence is another matter.
No google. I taught English here for eight years. I am certified (TEFL). I’ve also studied six foreign languages.
A compound noun is two or more nouns, the first modifying the second like an adjective would. Adjective-noun isn’t a compound noun. Of this I am certain. There is no such thing as a social. "Society media" would be a compound noun
The books I used in teaching gave the definition I wrote. That's why I had "theme park" at my fingertips, usually it takes me a long time to think of examples. I finally pulled out "test harness," since I am working with one lately. The books were from England, if there’s a different definition in America I’m not surprised.
I just saw “invite” used as a noun in a WaPo headline. I see and hear "unique" as a synonym for "distinctive" when it means "singular."
"I taught English here for eight years. I am certified (TEFL). I’ve also studied six foreign languages."
Haha, okay, I give up. Either literally every resource on compound nouns on the internet is wrong or you are. I'll leave you to ponder which is more likely.
So can "cordial," as an alcoholic beverage. But a cordial greeting is not a compound noun.
I already said I was done with this; you go ahead and treat it as a singular and I won't jump in every time. But I'll bet you that not one American in a hundred knows that media is the plural of medium, or that it's a plural at all. Does this also apply to "news media?"
Edit: I see where the disagreement lies. I looked up a few of those internet sources and they say that a compound noun is a noun with additional *words*. That definition doesn't require the other words to be nouns. So, "big dog" would be a compound noun, as would "tall building."
I am not buying that for a second.
My understanding, reinforced by every grammar text and ESL textbook I have ever read, is that "compound noun" is what it says: a combination of two or more nouns. Theme and park are both nouns; "theme park" is a compound noun. "Social media" is an adjective and noun; "social" here is an adjective, as in Social Security, it isn't in the sense of "church social" in which it is indeed a noun.
Not everything on the Internet is correct. And with everything from less/fewer and your/you're to classical music now regarded as "elitist," hardly anyone gives a fuck about correct grammar anymore.
Well, I'm not dumbing down my résumé with "action words" and I'm not using "they" for one person. Because I do give a fuck.
"And I would argue that 'social media' isn't any more social than television is." I'm so old I remember when there was ONLY television. Three networks. The entire country glued to the "boob tube." Parents worried about the plug-in drug.
But if you couldn't bear a celebrity, or even non-celebrity, female on the Tonight Show and you wanted to abuse her profanely and even threaten to rape or kill her and to reveal her address and phone number to countless numbers of other unhinged zanies, your options were to call the switchboard at NBC and hold the phone forever, only to be hung up on ten seconds into your rant, or you could write a letter to the woman c/o The Tonight Show, New York, NY. You were able to reach one or two people that way.
A difference in degree is a difference in kind. The speed and immediacy, combined with the anonymity, of social media has put us on a whole new playing field. Almost nothing about television was social, excepting the interchanges with the small number of people in the same room watching it with you. Social media is nothing BUT social.
"A difference in degree is a difference in kind. The speed and immediacy, combined with the anonymity, of social media has put us on a whole new playing field."
Absolutely. The scale of that difference can't be overstated. And more, it's such an all-consuming environment that people literally grow up in it.
TV was at home, and available for a few hours a day. Social media is everywhere. And is pinging people 24/7. And as well as giving you instant access to celebrities and whoever else you'd like to direct your ire at, as well as the algorithmic outrage it curates for you, it has the ability to punish you if you say something you're not supposed to. Or, increasingly, if you don't say the thing you're *supposed* to be saying loudly and stridently enough.
To whit, I was banned from Medium and from a nice thousand a month plus another half that in bonuses, for stating the uncontroversial fact that a "trans" woman is biologically male.
Wondering how long until inclusiveness requires no disagreement with geocentrism.
"Or, increasingly, if you don't say the thing you're *supposed* to be saying loudly and stridently enough."
Like "Trump won."
Found on the web, In our society, a man can say he's a woman, and was "born this way," but a man who says he wants to be traditionally masculine is "conditioned by society" and "toxic."
I am stealing that, albeit with attribution (to the web)
Don't underestimate the negative impact of television. It did more to isolate people from one another (and from debate) than anything before it. No more newsreels at the movie theatre with your neighbors; instead people sat alone in front of a tray of fast food consuming entertainment.
Television was the beginning of the breakdown of democracy.
The isolation from one another is what worries me about avid social media consumers far more than anything they are "consuming".
Most people, in most cultures, at most times have far more in common with one another than not, and would be hesitant to pull the trigger or do other off the wall sh** if they had ever sat down beside them and broken bread.
I grew up without TV, so I don't understand its pull, nor do I understand the attraction to gaming or Facebook or any of that stuff. What I do know is that the addiction is real, the replacement of real connections and relationships with virtual ones is unspeakably dangerous and destructive, on par with fentanyl or meth, but just less immediately obvious.
Salvation, such as it is or will be, must be clawed back one human interaction at a time. When I see even close family members glued to their phones during dinner, unable to let 60 seconds go by without scrolling through something, I teeter on the brink of despair....
Over here you'll see twenty teens at a restaurant, and nobody is talking to anyone else, they're all smiling at their phones. Even with terrific food.
If I had any family left and they were texting during dinner I would make a scene. "Put. That. Away." But I'm ... "Now."
The main attraction Facebook has for me is staying in touch with people on the other side of the world, most of whom I am unlikely to see again (I live in Vietnam). And that is 90% on the messenger application; I write very little on FB itself. No TV for forty years. I was away from it for a month and when I tried to watch something I couldn't stand it.
Egregious hijack: we went out to eat at "Chicken Plus" which is easy to figure out is a Korean franchise; the tiny salad bar includes dried seaweed, which is no more Vietnamese than salad bars; the CEO is grandfather Park and Park is a Korean name. Korean is for Vietnam what Italian is for America: the second cuisine. Even rural people who won't eat Vietnamese sandwiches will eat Korean.
The chicken is inexpressibly delicious. Just wow.
Almost nothing is open right now, Lunar New Year, but this place was.
Like the Chinese Christmas dinner in the movie "A Christmas Story."
I missed trying chicken when I was in Korea, opting for sea food instead.
...Which is now a general store here in Toronto (where part of that movie was shot ;)
Korean BBQ is just indescribably good. I've passed through Korea on layovers but never stayed long, only ate the complimentary hotel buffet. But the food on the planes is just amazing, I remember a few ... bibimbap, ssambas (yes two S at the beginning), a few others.
Funny thing is that it doesn't taste at all like Vietnamese but they're crazy about it.
Since I've never owned a television, I'm not objecting to your statement. But it wasn't toxic to the same degree that social media has become. Of course, the basic problem is the Homo sapiens is toxic. But that's another, albeit related, subject.
Well, television was preceded by radio. Or one could blame the telephone. What about the telegraph? I've often thought that Gutenberg really has a lot to answer for. Once people could read books by themselves, that was the beginning of the end of human community and the start of decadence and the end of empire. I've concluded that no single technology is to blame for this development. It's human nature that is to blame.
That is facile. The telephone enabled communication; television stifled it. Printing put knowledge into the hands of people who had been denied it; recording did the same for music.
What you're saying is as scrambled as "heroin and cocaine give people purpose."
Don't underestimate the contribution of 24-hour news, with the advent of CNN and an exponential increase in cable movie channels in the '80s. Before CNN, news came from half hour to one hour news shows in the morning and evening, and from the local newspaper, and the radio. If you wanted more news than that you subscribed to various magazines and periodicals. But the news WAS more balanced then, as the Fairness Doctrine was still in place, mandating equal time for political candidates, which Reagan got rid of because old-school conservative snowflakes were tired of having to listen to and present views outside their constipated bubble.
Because CNN had to fill 24 hours a day now with news, we got a lot more attention on the important stuff, but also a lot of stupid crap too, including people and stories which should never have been on the news. That was also the dawn of the beginnings of reality TV, like the live rescue of a little girl who'd fallen down a hole in the ground, and later, the OJ chase.
Nut groups like the KKK took advantage of this and created news with rallies & marches & so forth because they knew it would make the news. Whatever was outrageous and eye-catching leads. Or as Don Henley sang back then, "We all know that crap is king, give us your dirty laundry!"
Yep, 100%. The 24-hour news cycle was the beginning of a lot of this insanity.
Don't confuse the CNN of the modern entertainment network ("children with incurable disease and lost puppies" — Paddy Chayevsky) with it first few years. The erary years under Ted Turner were glorious. No just around the clock news but excellent commentary and interview shows; I watched Crossfire and Freeman Reports every day. Pat Buchanan was a brilliant interviewer and Lou Dobbs was the most professional anchorman ever, showing no trace of the bigotry that defines him now.
The Happy World of Entertainment shows were few, easily skipped, and only took up a small part of their day.
Needless to say, Things Went Bad, The Happy shows started taking more time, the commentary became shallower, Tom Braded got old and Fred Barnes took his place, then took Buchanan's. The rightward shift is more recent and by than television was long since out of my life.
The last decade would have been enormously different with the original CNN.
Wow. That Lord of the Flies thread is spot on. Why a generation of adults decided to bow to the whims of children is beyond me. It's not helpful for anyone, much in the way that giving a crying toddler cookies for dinner and saying they don't need to brush their teeth is ultimately a losing strategy.
It's amazing right?! Not just bowing to their whims, but pretty much allowing them to raise themselves. The idea that a five-year-old might not be competent to make decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives is sacrilege in certain circles now.
Not sure John quite understands the difference in reach between Twitter and postal mail. The concept of "exponential growth" is relevant here.
Right?! It was a little surreal seeing him double down. I think he just didn't want to admit he might be missing the larger point.
"Okay my friend, you win. Ideas, especially bad ideas, spread at exactly the same rate in the social media age as they did when the printing press was first invented. "
I love it when you reach the exasperation point and go sarcastic.
"whether classical music is white supremacy."
Oh dear god I had not seen that one. OK, another spoke on the great wheel of anti-intellectualism, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I've seen similar sentiments about progressive rock (Yes, ELP, Pulsar ...), the "whitest" rock, the least influence from hammer songs and Robert Johnson. Progressive rock is the only rock I still listen to, the blues influenced rock of my youth has little appeal now, and I wonder who decided that there is something missing in music without prominent black influence.
I'd die without classical music. Too call it "white supremacist" is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard all day, but it's only early afternoon.
"Oh dear god I had not seen that one. OK, another spoke on the great wheel of anti-intellectualism, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised."
Exactly. Brought to you by the same school of thought that banned the word "field" from USCs curriculum. Just virtue signallers desperately searching for new and more elaborate ways to signal their virtue.
Well, you could say they're just taking things to their logical conclusion. If Western European ideas were founded on colonialism and slavery, then everything that springs from them is poisoned. Our legal system has the concept of "the fruit of the poisoned tree" and so does current progressive "thinking", apparently. Which is ironic, if you take a step back. Mary Harrington's essay "How to Find Meaning When Everything is Power" delineates this very well: https://www.palladiummag.com/2020/03/26/how-to-find-meaning-when-everything-is-power/
Harrington writes
"If even the hardest of hard sciences now advances a theory of reality that embrace radical uncertainty and the implication of the observer in what is observed"
Her grasp of physics is decades out of date. Google Wigner's Friend.
To analyze postmodernism for its flaws makes as much sense as analyzing Trump's strategy.
Genau. Or, vernacularizing, another way to make pains in the ass of themselves.
"Pain in the asses" to the signallers. Proper grammar is so eurocentric, and ineruditephobic.
I'm one who enjoys and appreciates Americana, the blend of European melody and harmony with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms which in my opinion are more sophisticated. Culturally "white" European children learned rhythm via "Patty cake, Patty cake" rhythms which at least in the past, "black" children learned more polyrhythmic "Tom, Tom greedy gut" rhythms. I consider it to be a wonderful blend. Does that mean we should reject unblended music from various sources because of where it came from? What a horrible idea. When the record labels came up with the "race music" classification it was a curse.
You might check out Juno Reactor, the inventors of the genre psychedelic trance, in their first album "Transmissions," which I always listen to on a plane taking off. The opening track samples HAL 9000 saying "You're gonna have a wonderful trip" (echoes)
Heavy Afro-Cuban rhythms, very dark, darker with each release. Probably the dance-music distant relationship isn't your cuppa tea but they are the only techno-derived music I still listen to.
Well done, but not my thing.
I can relate to his first comment. X-ists tend to wear a thicker veil when not behind a keyboard. Mike Tyson quote goes here. However <comma> the internet has a wide reach with low expense as you pointed out.
Music was previously king of spreading ideas because it is memorable, and people want to hear it. What internet article will be remembered and remain impactful for as many years as Dylan singing "Masters of War", "Blowing in the Wind" or Pete Seeger singing "We Shall Overcome" which became a civil rights anthem? But there's more. You can spew venom in a silo without a musician or poet's talent.
I'm old enough to remember short wave radio listening for variety of political propaganda which was always an artful blend of truth and lies when coming from government sources. The same skills are used at the source for what gets spread on the internet, but social media has the power of being spread by "friends" and "influencers". That power is very real. Especially because people want to participate. I'm participating right now.
"X-ists tend to wear a thicker veil when not behind a keyboard. "
Yeah, definitely. People are certainly "braver" when they don't have to stand behind their words with their face and name. But it's not the name-calling that's the issue. That's the least of the concerns as far as I'm concerned. It's the speed with which lies and bad information can spread and become absolutely, unquestionably true in the minds of some people.
Ten years ago, say, how many people do you think were seriously arguing that trans women are women? Not just that they should be thought of as women in most cases, or that the decent thing to do was treat them as they wished to be treated, but that they literally are women. Female even.
Today, a significant number of people, some in positions of power, genuinely believe this. Or, at least, are willing to go to their graves pretending that they do. We live in a different reality to the compulsively online. And it's not clear at all which side is going to win out.
Another instance of what I'm calling the Epistemological Crisis.
It's a lot worse than virtue signalling, which ultimately boils down to pretense, conformity, and conceit. If you've seen "What is a Woman" you can see how addled some of these people are.
And how dishonest.
This forum doesn't have pictures so right there 90% of the dumbest are repelled, and if it has emoji, I don't see them.
One thing I find really creepy is how invested so many people are in this social media junk. They care more about how many followers they have than about the quality of what they write. One woman on Twitter with many thousands had her account hacked and posted videos on another actually crying about it. With tears. Twitter is her life.
Since Musk started his dalliance with it, he's lost half his fortune. He neglects his real businesses to obsess over his Twitter image and has disgraced himself repeatedly, It's done him a lot of harm.
It's done the world a lot of harm.
That people take their behavior cues from social media comes as no surprise to me, nor should it to you.
As long as I've been alive it's been obvious that people take their cues from television, which tells them how they are supposed to act. Since before my teens I have had vast contempt for this level of conformity and have called it "sposta," the colloquial pronunciation of "supposed to." And most of all from TV ads, which have to be upbeat and perky to Sell The Product. Manipulatively drawing people in.
Leading this charge is The Smile. The Smile is youthful, it's attractive, people will click a link to something otherwise uninteresting if the link is below Smile. In my high school there was a hallway of yearbook photos going back to the late 19th century. Up until around 1955 the expressions were serious, from solemn to engaging, and postures were vertical and facing the camera. Later you saw that broken neck with the elbow on the knee that has become the standard, with, yup, The Smile.
My uncle gave me some books from the middle of the last century by a satirist who went by the single name Osborne, and in one of them he talked about this. Reading it in my teens affected me deeply. The effect contributed to losing my job teaching because my students compained that I didn't smile all the time (I have minor facial paralysis and cannot smile except in reaction, not that I would if I could).
Vietnamese girls *are* instructed to smile all the time; one of my students kept a vapid expression on her face as I described a gang of kids on motorbikes kicking a little lost dog to death. The girl who sent me into motorbike tumble was beaming at the air like she had a 16oz Coke bottle in her. They make misogyny tempting.
I smile very rarely. I am not going to let TV ads tell me how I'm sposta behave.
Looking at ancestral family pictures 3+ generations back they all looked like Baptist ministers about to preach hell fire and damnation. The oldest picture with a smile is my maternal grandmother. A genuine unforced smile. She was a beauty.
Aside: I've been reminding people for years that "they" is plural; why do I have to do the same with "media?" Media is the plural of medium, where you originate your writing, Steve. What's next? "People is?" Not aimed at Steve, most people do this.
Repeat after me. Media are. Media are. Social media are. I mean, we aren't talking about complex declensions here (English doesn't have them) or reflexive verbs. We're talking about singular and plural.
There is no doubt that social media are harmful. They encourage hyperfactionalization. Yes, there was racial animus before Facebook but nothing validates a racist like seeing himself as part of a movement, something that was hard to maintain when racists had to be face to face with their fellow bigots and could see that they were a mob of losers.
Triviality reminder: there are almost no emotional controls online. You don't get facial expressions and you can shut out disagreement with a click (we all do it; no "they/them" in my browser). The MAGAts are on pages I never see and they don't see any caring sentiment.
The attempted insurrection on the Brazilian seat of government was organized on Facebook; TikTok is so aggressively shallow that unpopular kids commit suicide from it; Twitter is a cesspool of hate speech. It gave Trump a platform of stochastic assassination and his removal from it elevated dialog.
I got off Twitter a month ago; unable to find the willpower I did some posts I knew would get me banned. It was good for my emotional health.
There's probably no putting the genie back in the bottle but at least these media could be regulated.
Oh, wait. "Free speech."
"Media is the plural of medium"
Yes. But "social media" is a compound noun that can be used in both the plural and the singular. I'm pretty sure we've had this conversation before. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/social-media
That's possible, though I don't remember it. Still, every time I seee "media is" it's jarring all over again.
I was born like this; I was over three years old before I uttered my first words, and they were a sentence. Someone/they actually gives me a headache. Not as bad as cigarette smoke or Whitney Houston, but a headache.
I'll try not to be a pain in the ass but I've been called a grammar Nazi for calling out your for you're, which in my mind is subliterate.
"I'll try not to be a pain in the ass but I've been called a grammar Nazi for calling out your for you're, which in my mind is subliterate."
Haha, you'll find nothing but solidarity from me on this one. I feel a twinge of pain if autocorrect confuses "your" with "you're" in a text or some such. And yes, "media is..." wrong, but "social media is..." is correct. Sadly, English is hardly a model of consistency.
"And yes, "media is..." wrong, but "social media is..." is correct."
That makes zero sense. That's like saying "people" is plural but "crazy people" is singular.
And that definition is wrong. Social media are not uncountable, like water; "less people" drives me nuts, coming from people who would never say "fewer water." Partitivity is very important in Russian grammar. Social media are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. One, two, three.
Look, I'm not saying that we should take a snapshot of English and never allow any changes. There have been changes in my lifetime that I don't object to, like the unsilencing of the first c is Arctic. I've grown up thinking that the participle of "get" is "gotten" but it turns out that it's actually "got" as it still is in the Commonwealth, but too many people did a palin with "forget" and now "have gotten" has become standard. The Commonwealth spelling of gray no longer evokes a red squiggle in an American spellchecker. I can deal.
But putting an adjective in front of media doesn't change the word, it's just that most Americans are morons with language (and with chat conventions this is going to get a lot worse), they *never* think before speaking, they paint themselves into corners and then get out with awful grammar.
"If someone who wants to do better in school, uh, they should study harder"
a millisecond of forethought
"People who want to do better in school should study harder."
Maybe it's my aforementioned preoccupation with clean grammar, maybe it's learning Russian at 13 and four years of German in high school, maybe it's trying to avoid words likely to make me stutter. but I've been thinking before speaking all my life and if I have ever used the singular they it had to have been when my age was single digits.
And I absolutely do not subscribe to the idea that a majority making a mistake means it is no longer a mistake. I don't care if I end up as the last person on earth using "you're." I don't care if the Oxford dictionary says "they" is a gender neutral singular (I see no point in gender neutrality anyway); dictionaries are lists of definitions, not usage guides, and only the best of them mention that "ain't" is deprecated.
Yes, I know I am going to be annoyed the rest of my life.
"That makes zero sense. That's like saying "people" is plural but "crazy people" is singular."
No, it's like saying that "sheep" is singular and "sheep" is plural. Or that the plural of "opus" is "opera." As you say, expecting English grammar to make perfect sense is a recipe for a lifetime of annoyance.
And no, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are social media *companies*. Social media, as a concept, is uncountable. It's really an umbrella term for the various forms of electronic communication that have sprung up in the past 20 years or so.
Anyway, I'm not trying to convince you not to say "social media are..." just to not have an aneurism when somebody uses the perfectly fine "social media is...".
I don't see how the phrase under discussion could possibly be singular but going in circles isn't my thing."Social media usage" is uncountable, but I think we've worn this out.
When I see "opus" it's always as "op." Sheet music is part of my daily life.
English grammar is regular as Vietnamese (all SVO, even questions) compared to some others; in Spanish and Russian "like" is intransitive, "pizza is liked by/to me," and in Russian plural begins with five, not two. In Russian there are about six ducks that have to be set in their rows; in English there is only singular vs. plural and still most people can't handle it. I'd bet money that singularity of SM was a convention born of exasperation.
I'll try not to have an aneurism. Really.
In the past week I've seen "gratefulness" and "ferociousness" on Facebook and when I responded with "gratitude" and "ferocity" I got ferociousnessally yelled at.
Doubleplusgood, eh?
Thanks to the large differences in English and Thai grammar, I have become impervious to grammatical error when not politically inspired.
My first serious langrage study was Russian at 13 with enormously complicated grammar, my most recent Vietnamese with the simplest there is (no pronouns, adverbs, conjugation, declension ...). Bad grammar is almost painful to me. Scratch "almost." I'm dual-verbal and I stopped trying to be relaxed about it a long time ago.
The way I see it, every word is a contract, and if people break the contract then we cannot bridge minds at all.
BTW since "social" is an adjective, "social media" isn't a compound noun. A compound noun is, z.B., "theme park" or "home work.," two or more nouns that together mean something specific.
In Vietnamese since the number of posssible words that don't violate spelling rules is very small, there are tons of compound words and often that make no sense taken individually.
"BTW since "social" is an adjective, "social media" isn't a compound noun. A compound noun is, z.B., "theme park" or "home work.," two or more nouns that together mean something specific."
Chris, you know you can just do a quick Google search before saying things like this, right? I never begrudge people being wrong. But being wrong with such confidence is another matter.
No google. I taught English here for eight years. I am certified (TEFL). I’ve also studied six foreign languages.
A compound noun is two or more nouns, the first modifying the second like an adjective would. Adjective-noun isn’t a compound noun. Of this I am certain. There is no such thing as a social. "Society media" would be a compound noun
The books I used in teaching gave the definition I wrote. That's why I had "theme park" at my fingertips, usually it takes me a long time to think of examples. I finally pulled out "test harness," since I am working with one lately. The books were from England, if there’s a different definition in America I’m not surprised.
I just saw “invite” used as a noun in a WaPo headline. I see and hear "unique" as a synonym for "distinctive" when it means "singular."
"I taught English here for eight years. I am certified (TEFL). I’ve also studied six foreign languages."
Haha, okay, I give up. Either literally every resource on compound nouns on the internet is wrong or you are. I'll leave you to ponder which is more likely.
Also, yes, "social" can be a noun.
So can "cordial," as an alcoholic beverage. But a cordial greeting is not a compound noun.
I already said I was done with this; you go ahead and treat it as a singular and I won't jump in every time. But I'll bet you that not one American in a hundred knows that media is the plural of medium, or that it's a plural at all. Does this also apply to "news media?"
Edit: I see where the disagreement lies. I looked up a few of those internet sources and they say that a compound noun is a noun with additional *words*. That definition doesn't require the other words to be nouns. So, "big dog" would be a compound noun, as would "tall building."
I am not buying that for a second.
My understanding, reinforced by every grammar text and ESL textbook I have ever read, is that "compound noun" is what it says: a combination of two or more nouns. Theme and park are both nouns; "theme park" is a compound noun. "Social media" is an adjective and noun; "social" here is an adjective, as in Social Security, it isn't in the sense of "church social" in which it is indeed a noun.
Not everything on the Internet is correct. And with everything from less/fewer and your/you're to classical music now regarded as "elitist," hardly anyone gives a fuck about correct grammar anymore.
Well, I'm not dumbing down my résumé with "action words" and I'm not using "they" for one person. Because I do give a fuck.