today on the meme curmudgeon

[pauraque_bk]

I was about to post this on Twitter, but, uh...

Social media has lowered the bar for doing good

This has been going on a lot longer than Twitter and Facebook have existed. Remember when colorbars were sincere and not ironic? Thems were the days. I actually have always felt the same way about awareness ribbons (even though I used to wear one, it was for breast cancer... guess I was a hypocrite!) and bumper stickers and so on. It makes perfect sense that this stuff has migrated to social networking, which for many people is largely about looking good in front of their friends.

I don't think it's as consciously cynical as that makes it sound. I doubt anybody is thinking "Ha ha, by turning my icon green I'll make my political views apparent to my friends, thus earning their approval!" But it can come off that way, and it doesn't surprise me at all that most people stop at the symbolic part and don't do anything concrete.

I wish we had more of the "donate $10 to Haiti with a text" memes and less of the merely symbolic ones, is all I mean by this.

Comments

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

I don't know, Pauraque. I think that if we didn't have these symbolic statements, we'd have no political or social speech at all - just material/entertainment speech.

[pauraque]

That could be a pretty grim assessment depending on what you mean. You think there's no content-rich political speech anymore, nothing above the level of a meme? Or did you mean that a different way?

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

amongst the people who do the meme stuff, yes. They're pretty uninterested in political speech or consider it inappropriate for conversation, or whatever. I haven't seen politically inclined people replacing their actions or more content-laden speech with memes. Mostly I just see people who were unlikely to say anything about social or political issues at all wearing their opinions as innocuous little badges - which I'm fine with - better than nothing at all.

[pauraque]

I guess two things come to mind about that. One is to wonder if there's a better way to tap into the "otherwise would do nothing" people, more along the lines of texting to donate to good causes, though financial donations are something not everyone can do.

But the other thing is to frankly wonder about how much a person like that is really expressing an opinion on whatever topic they're memeing about, versus how much they're just parroting what their friends say. And I am bothered by that.