Coagulopath has a particularly thorough deconstruction of a current phenomenon this week. Now I've never called anyone a "soyboy" and I don't plan to. At my age any such epithet would wound my dignity as much as his, probably more. But it's an interesting read nonetheless.
When he says this type of young man is "'woke' but a special kind of woke" I think that gets at this particular class and a lot more besides. The phrase "attention economy has come into high use in recent years. Attention is understood to be an increasingly rare resource.
The great virtualizing of physical space, the reduction of everything to a few images and hashtags, the constant need to keep checking your phone to see if everything's changed: all this has created a very damaged kind of person. But they can take comfort in the fact that there's always a way to take that damage and grab more attention with it.
So that makes it all right? Questionable.
2 comments:
I'll say that's a 'particularly thorough deconstruction', so much so I had difficulty making my way through all of it, so I skipped around and got the gist. Talk about a sad and depressing trend among a group of people.
When we talked about it this morning Jer told me how reaction videos may have begun when video gamers began live streaming the games they were playing. Of course doing that required a certain amount of skill to play in the first place but doing that successfully could make the player money from the audience share as well as frequently being paid directly by the companies whose games became even more popular as a result. It was a win win situation, particularly at first.
However, doing that requires expertise, ever more so as more players streamed, and it takes effort as well. Instead, why not just show multiple channels of players reacting to 'jump scares' in games (ie, the zombie jumping out of the closet)? That got very popular too and now it looks like there's a cohort who've discovered all they have to do to get a few followers is to tape themselves reacting to anything.
I agree the end result has created some very damaged people - no matter what they call themselves. Woke culture is always divisive.
I can see how taking it all in could be a little much. Part of it is that the internet has increased the amount of information out there in the world but...not really the good kind.
I've only watched a few minutes from the genre of video game walkthrough videos, but I know that they get huge audiences. Huge young audiences, to be specific. That's a lucrative market, and a way to make a big name and get some nice change, too.
Have other people followed with cheap gimmicks. I'm sure. And there tend to be waves of them of a certain kind. That's probably part of what it means to go viral. But making social media trends a core part of your identity is bound to lead nowhere good.
You're right that woke culture is always divisive. Oftentimes that seems to be the point. If there's a fifth horseman of the apocalypse he might be called "intersectionality."
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