First and foremost, this is for an English essay. If you could take my survey so that I may cite you in my essay, that would be great. Note that your first and last name will be required at the end of the survey. Thanks in advance for anybody who takes it. The Survey. Beyond that, I feel like there's a discussion to be had about culture jamming, the internet's role in culture jamming, and all that jazz. Anybody have any opinions on Anonymous? EDIT: I just noticed that it would be advantageous to include my survey's introduction in this post so that the thread can have some background.
Uh. I'm not really hip to all this jazz, but it seems that Anon is completely missing the point of Twitter. It's designed for pop culture. For the mainstream Twitter user, it's useful for gleaning the newest news for who's smooching who in 160 characters or less. Obviously, we've seen it be an extremely powerful tool for social movements (Iranian elections, Egyptian revolution, Occupy Wall Street, etc) but that's not what the creators of Twitter had in mind. They created a site for anyone and everyone to share what's on their mind, and that's exactly what's happening. As far as the overarching 'culture-jamming' aspect of it goes, I'm not even sure what Anon is trying to accomplish. From what I gather, they're tweeting their own messages at rapid rates with popular hashtags attached? I honestly don't see what this will accomplish, because the clique of people who click on the #jerseyshore hashtag are not going to care about Anon's message, really no matter what it is.
Not every bit of fun needs to have a political message attached. Sometimes, chatting needs to just be chatting. Anonymous ( or at least a part of it) seems to be completely missing the point of casual conversation. I could make a joke about asocial nerds here, but due to anonymous' anonymous nature, this could only be a very small group. There's no way to check.
Sure, the point of twitter is a platform for casual chatting-but shouldn't we be proponents of casually chatting about the things that matter? Twitter is only encouraging people to engage in less and less intellectually stimulating conversation. Anonymous is hi-jacking trending topics and blatantly "derailing the thread" with floods of posts about what they deem to be more important.
We should encourage meaningful discussion, I'm not disparaging that. You're missing the point of Twitter too it seems though. Twitter itself encourages nothing but casually chatting. They don't pick the trending topic. In fact, they've actually come under flak a few times about NOT censoring trends. It's the userbase themselves that control what the topics are. Yeah, Anon will probably succeed on a superficial level, in that they will indeed flood the trending topics with 'important' information, but that's not going to accomplish anything. As an example. Go up to a Beiber fanatic, and try to start a meaningful discussion about socio-economic change. You wouldn't be able to. Why? Because they're twelve. Ok, let's try someone else. A trending topic today - Happy Birthday Katy Perry. Let's try one of them. What do you think would happen if I messaged them about current events? I'd imagine it wuld be something along the lines of 'stfu, Katy Perry's husband is running for prez lolk.' These people simply don't care. And here's the crux of it, what's important to you and I and Anon isn't important to Tina Palucci in New Jersey or Colette Hartford in Long Island or Chad Montgomery in Las Vegas. And they will probably never care, and there's little you or I or Anon can do to change their minds, as far as Twitter goes anyway.
And I don't think we should anyway, even if we could. We have no rights to judge peoples choices in casual conversation. Wir sind nicht das Gehirn Polizei. And since I certainly don't feel like using words like doubleplusgood and goodthinkwise, I don't feel like we should become them. Besides, gossiping about celebrities can be fun.
Just playing devil's advocate, mostly because my essay was to argue positively for it. I just talked to the professor though and I get to argue negatively now. Do you two mind if I cite your forum posts?
