Saturday Food for Thought
From The New Yorker, a thoughtful article by Mark O'Connell, "First Thought, Worst Thought," about thinking before you hit send. I would think that includes Facebook, e-mail, texts or Twitter. Something to talk to the kids about, perhaps.
On the one hand:
As Roxane Gay put it in an essay on her ambivalence about the public shaming of Sacco: “The world is full of unanswered injustice and more often than not we choke on it. When you consider everything we have to fight, it makes sense that so many people rally around something like the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet. In this one small way, we are, for a moment, less impotent.”
Or maybe:
The weird randomness of this sudden mutation of person into meme is, in the end, what’s so haunting. This could just as well have happened to anyone—any of the thousands of people who say awful things on Twitter every day. It’s not that Sacco didn’t deserve to be taken to task, to be scorned for the clumsiness and hurtfulness of her joke; it’s that the corrective was so radically comprehensive and obliterating, and administered with such collective righteous giddiness. This is a new form of violence, a symbolic ritual of erasure where the condemned is made to stand for a whole class of person—to be cast, as an effigy of the world’s general awfulness, into a sudden abyss of fame.
From Whim W'Him, a story about an art exhibit about a drawing of a gun and what the artist allowed people to do to it.
From the Huffington Post, a story about ad differences for girls and how they have apparently gotten more girly.
On the one hand:
As Roxane Gay put it in an essay on her ambivalence about the public shaming of Sacco: “The world is full of unanswered injustice and more often than not we choke on it. When you consider everything we have to fight, it makes sense that so many people rally around something like the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet. In this one small way, we are, for a moment, less impotent.”
Or maybe:
The weird randomness of this sudden mutation of person into meme is, in the end, what’s so haunting. This could just as well have happened to anyone—any of the thousands of people who say awful things on Twitter every day. It’s not that Sacco didn’t deserve to be taken to task, to be scorned for the clumsiness and hurtfulness of her joke; it’s that the corrective was so radically comprehensive and obliterating, and administered with such collective righteous giddiness. This is a new form of violence, a symbolic ritual of erasure where the condemned is made to stand for a whole class of person—to be cast, as an effigy of the world’s general awfulness, into a sudden abyss of fame.
From Whim W'Him, a story about an art exhibit about a drawing of a gun and what the artist allowed people to do to it.
From the Huffington Post, a story about ad differences for girls and how they have apparently gotten more girly.
Comments
I am a firm believer that young children should be taught about marketing in school somewhere around 3rd–5th grade. Sooner would be better, but I don't know if they could grasp the concept before then.
SolvayGirl