Digital Culture Audio Project
Title: How Online Communities Can Cause Neural Rewiring
Transcription:
Growing up, who was your role model that you were inspired by? Perhaps it was a mom, dad, or other legal guardian. An older sibling, a family friend, a teacher. Maybe even your doctor, nurse, or coach. For as long as society has existed, people’s ideological frameworks have been built upon the behaviors and values of their support system. When you’re a young kid, your support system is often assigned to you by your parents, who try to parse out who they believe will be good role models for their children. When you’re that young and impressionable, it is important that you are surrounded by people who make good decisions and are ideologically sound. So, what happens to a generation of children who spend their time watching people that their parents do not monitor and guide them towards? Instead of wanting to grow up to be like their mom, or the firefighter who lives across the street, they are developing core values based on the words of famous influencers or content creators. Today, I am going to talk about the psychological effect that social media, specifically online communities, can have on your mental, emotional, and social perception of reality.
Social media platforms are a great example of how digital technology can help organize niche communities that promote shared interests and ideologies. Through participating in these group discussions, users can shape their online identities, share their own ideas, and form digital connections. However, it is important to remember that these communities are not just interacting with their own people, but on the greater platform they are choosing to communicate with. Users may not just want to talk to people they share similar interests with, but garner attention from the general audience of the application. To foster these interactions, one might be encouraged to use persuasive language to get the most likes, reposts, or shares. But the way to get the most attention on the internet is not by saying the most objective pieces of information, but instead using fear or anger tactics to strike an emotional chord by the user’s audience. Many online communities will garner attention from “locals”, by victimizing themselves and creating this illusion that their smaller community is under attack by society at large. For example, conspiracy theorist communities will often frame their theories under the notion that higher authorities are trying to hide or censor their communication with the outside world to blind people from the “truth”. Although this sounds like a relatively niche problem, this psychological fear-mongering can have effects on how people behave in the real world. Some adults have chosen to home-school their children because online communities have convinced them that the public school system is “corrupting” or “indoctrinating” their kids. They often say that public schools enforce liberal ideologies and will force their young children into learning about critical race theory or “groom” them into thinking that they are gay or transgender [1]. Although it’s easy to cast aside these fears as bad faith acting, I often wonder if these communities are taking advantage of ignorant or mentally struggling parents who are genuinely being duped by these fear-mongering tactics.
Interestingly, even communities meant for kids or teenagers can inhabit these same talking points. Fandom culture, which is characterized by communities formed to celebrate public figures, like singers, actresses, YouTubers, or streamers, can often evoke this same conspiratorial rhetoric. With the rise in discussion of the music industry due to the popularity of Diddy’s sexual assault cases, many fandoms have tried to capitalize on this popularity by inserting their own fandom talking points into the general public’s discussion. Currently, fandoms that do not like Beyonce, such as Nicki Minaj’s “Barbz”, Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters”, and Taylor Swift’s “Swifties”, are creating posts implying that J Cole’s song “She Knows” is about Beyonce knowing about Diddy’s predatory behavior, and purposefully ignoring it because his power over other women’s careers uplifted her own [2]. Although this seems like a harmless conspiracy, making a spectacle of a real-life sexual abuse trial and trying to use it for their own gain can be trivializing to actual victims of the case. It can also be interpreted as misogynistic. Even though this is a clear example of a man using his power to abuse others, somehow, the blame is still being diverted towards a woman. The need to profit off of something this serious is so bleak, that people are willing to try and expose or “out” other people as victims, such as Justin Bieber. Whether or not Beyonce actually knew about Diddy being a sexual abuser beforehand, we’ll never truly know, but the fact of the matter is that these communities are more interested in spreading these conspiracies to put someone that they already disliked down than they are in uplifting the voices of the confirmed victims and making them feel seen.
In fact, these talking points can even reach bigoted language. For example, fans of Taylor Swift, known as “Swifties” often use racist or anti-black language when describing her feud with Kanye West, or even putting down black music or art as a whole to uplift Swift. One popular YouTuber and Tik Toker named Kevin Leonardo went viral for saying that Kendrick Lamar’s music is quote-unquote “Not for everybody”, in order to justify why Taylor Swift won a Grammy award over him [3]. Swifties have also previously sent racist threats to a black actress because her character made a joke about Taylor Swift’s dating life [4]. Although these sound like isolated incidents, I believe these actions do not exist in a void, and instead, the communities these fandoms participate in facilitate these ways of thinking, which encourages them to act this way. When you spend all of your time around other people who have the exact same opinions as you, your brain associates an outsider’s opinion as an immediate threat. In fact, a common word used to describe detractors of a fandom’s subject is “anti”. This creates a dichotomy where anyone who deviates from the fandom’s shared values is inherently bad, and the fandom needs to band together to take down that person.
I hope this deep dive compels you to think about the language and talking points you hear when you’re mindlessly scrolling on social media. Does the speaker want you to form a certain narrative that demonizes one group while uplifting the other? Do they want you to develop fear, anxiety, or anger, in order to direct you to a plan of action? Any of these questions, or even just general mindfulness, can prevent people from ideologically worshiping certain individuals, and instead view them as just another person posting on social media.
Citations:
1. More parents are home-schooling. Some are never turning back – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
2. Media posts by welp. (@YSLONIKA) / X (twitter.com)
3. Debunking Tiktok’s Worst Swiftie – YouTube
4. Taylor Swift Fans Attack ‘Ginny and Georgia’ Star Antonia Gentry | Marie Claire
Credit for audio clips:
Intro and outro music: “Melancholy Lull” on bensound
“She Knows” by J Cole, Amber Coffman, and Cults
@thecoolestkev on Tik Tok created the Taylor Swift video referenced, but he has since deleted the video.
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