Application to the New York Times’ The Edit (February 2018)
Prompt: What’s the best thing you’ve read this week?
“For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated… But today that playbook is all but obsolete. Whose throat do you squeeze when anyone can set up a Twitter account in seconds…” writes Zeynep Tufekci in an article for WIRED Magazine. “The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself.” She invokes bots “which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable cost on the act of speaking out”, and the immense power that social media companies wield in determining their success. She concludes with a call for her readers to assume an active role in the conversation surrounding the responsible handing of this power.
Tufekci’s article emphasizes the absolute monopoly these companies have on my generation’s trust and attention. I live on a cold, hilly, intimidatingly vast college campus in upstate New York where physically accessing people is often difficult. So online communities for a host of Cornell-specific interests are always ablaze with activity. The paragon of these is “Cornell: Any Person, Any Meme” and at its helm is the “meme queen”, whom I will just refer to as Q.
Q’s posts about teaching male engineers to talk to women, failed pickup lines and the inescapable weather garner several hundred likes and spawn branching rivers of comment conversations. Today in a panicked post she lamented that because of an experiment for class she will be absent from Facebook for a week. Quarantine from her beloved meme page was, for her, a source of considerable trepidation.
Q represents many members of my generation. Our personalities are multi-faceted; for some of us, our best sides only come out online. I have friends who are members of Facebook groups that serve as spaces to discuss their unique struggles as people of color. One friend told me that he has revealed some of his most intimate thoughts and experiences to this group, the kind that he wouldn’t even share with his family. For these people and so many others, online spaces hosted by social media companies are irreplaceable parts of their identities.
Yet as Tufekci reports, it is also our generation calling for these very companies to modify their algorithms so that they have less power over what we see and how much we trust it. Our identities are composed in part by these algorithms, yet we also want to change them. For some of our peers these changes will affect very real parts of their lives. The Internet has developed as the champion of the voiceless, it has given community to those who feel alone and persecuted, but its open and unregulated nature has also allowed our generation to be exploited. It is a vast ocean with many fishers and phishers. A decision to block a white supremacist could simultaneously silence a marginalized group. We have a responsibility to take all voices into account when demanding policy changes from companies. And there are a staggering number.
