Wicked Witches, Flying Monkeys and Us In-between
In the final act of film, The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West stood in her tower window and ordered her flying monkeys to capture the character Dorothy and her band of misfits. Toto too. She screamed at her minions, “Fly, my pretties! Fly!”
And they flew. They lifted Dorothy, mid-step, and delivered her to the Witch to be held in captivity until she gave up her magical ruby slippers. In the end, things did not turn out well for the Witch. Turns out she wasn’t as powerful as she thought. But man, those flying monkeys were scary. I recall being more scared of these winged, blue marsupials than anything else. Perhaps it wasn’t one flying monkey, in particular, but the sheer volume of flying monkeys. Was it hundreds? Thousands? Did the Witch really need hundreds of flying monkeys to capture one little girl?
Seems like overkill.
The Wizard of Oz was a story based in fantasy, but those flying monkeys and Wicked Witches are more real than ever before. You need not look into the sky to find a swarm of them looking for little girls in bejeweled slippers. They aren’t there. These monkeys and their witchy bosses are found right in the palm of your hand.
The advent of social media has given birth to the “social media influencer”. This is a person whose followers are so numerous and loyal that they have become a one person media machine that advertisers clamor to get support from. And their influence equals dollars.
Recently, I was looking for a temporary hair dye for a costume. My Instagram, through some algorithm that can read my mind (and phone content), suggested a product for me. I wanted some back-up, so I went on YouTube and I looked for videos from influencers who had used the product and filmed their results and opinions. After their endorsement, I ordered the product.
This is how social media can work in a helpful way. Good Witches if you will. Helpful Glindas in pink bubbles advising you which way will lead you home. Just as easily as those influencers swayed me to buy the product, they could have been swayed not to buy it.
Social media has made us all influencers to a degree. When we share stories, or thoughts. Jokes or jabs. We put out into the world a message that we want our followers to know and perhaps share. At times this creates a chain reaction of sharing and influencing that can go viral. And those viral moments have power. Some would argue they can sway elections.
As in L. Frank Baum’s fantastical tale, for every Good Witch of the North there is a Wicked Witch flying in the west.
In the news recently, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Press Secretary for the White House, visited a small restaurant called The Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia. Sanders, is one of the most visible representatives of the President and has been criticized for her combative tone with the media and tendency to lie. During that visit the owner asked her to please leave.
The issue of whether or not the owner should have refused service to Sanders is a separate. But as the story was reported by both Sanders and the restaurant owner, the interaction, which was based on Sanders politics, was civil and respectful. The owner even comped a cheese plate for the party Sanders was meeting. This could have been a non-event. But it wasn’t.
Sanders used her Twitter account to share the story with her 231 thousand followers. This was picked up by the news and then by her boss, the President, whose followers are around 53.3 million. Soon after this The Red Hen and every other Red Hen restaurant in the country (none of which are affiliated) started to receive harassment and support from the followers of the news, Sanders and the President. In other words, the United States of America.
Just a little restaurant with a handful of tables and six employees, being swarmed by millions of people for a civil interaction that didn’t amount to much at the time.
Seems like overkill.
We have been at a point in the world for a while with social media where the population has selected out winners and losers. Influencers and influencees. Witches and Flying Monkeys. There are more “famous” people than ever before. So many so that they have watered down what it even means to be famous. The only truly famous person int he world is Beyonce’.
What separates the wheat from the chaff, in an effort to use yet another analogy, is to see who can influence and who can be influenced with little regard for the veracity of the content. It is a system that has turned the world upside down.
Less than twenty years ago we got our information from only a handful of resources. The proverbial hose of information was monitored by the tight fist of the networks and the government. But 2018 is the wild west of influence and people are acting accordingly.
There is more nuance to our current situation than many of our brains are able to process, however. For centuries perceived only binary choices in an effort to make our lives more manageable when living was more time consuming with mundacity. Yes or No. This or That. Man or Woman. We needed simpler choices because we had more to do.
For instance, today I received three packages in the mail. I bought them online. The transaction took 5 minutes to make and only a few days to receive. There was no finding time to find a store that I would have to drive to after I went to work and after I fed the dog and after I got gas in the car. A task that used to take two hours was simplified. I was left with 115 spare minutes to occupy my brain. I can waste 115 minutes on social media very easily. That is a lot of time to be influenced.
The problem here is that my brain, despite all of the constant software updates it receives, has not fully converted to the new system. Remnants of the old way of thinking have left me vulnerable to becoming gullible. I am embarrassed to share how many “Personality Quizzes” I clicked on in the last ten years in order to find out if I the internet could guess my spirit animal. It’s a rabbit, by the way.
In real life, if I was friends with Sarah Sanders and she came to me in person and shared the story of The Red Hen, I would likely have told her that it sounded like a shitty night. Then I would have gone home and maybe told my boyfriend. He would not have been interested.
If Sanders boss had called me the next day and told me the same story, I would have thought it was the weirdest thing in the world. Then I would have told my boyfriend and he would have been totally interested. Not because it’s the President, but because it’s a weird thing to re-message from your boss, no less.
The story would have died or turned into a different story about Sanders’ weird boss. Yet somehow, when we get a story from social media we feel compelled to share. Not only share; destroy!
We are capable of more complex thought than this. We are not a swarm of flying monkeys that need only be shouted at before we decide to attack a wandering trope of lost individuals. In our collective quest to switch from Influencee into Influencer. Normal to Famous. Irrelevant to Important. Flying Monkey into Witch. We forget that we don’t actually have to be either.
This story about The Red Hen was not worthy of the attention and vitriol it created. If a neighbor had come up to me and told me that Sanders told them that story and then they decided to set The Red Hen on fire I would think they were crazy. But if they forward it to me on Twitter then I must instantly find my Tiki Torch and gas can!
Burn the witch! Fly, my pretties! Fly!
We need to spend less time forwarding and influencing and more time just sitting down and doing nothing. Social media has made devil’s playthings out of our idle hands and it is our own fault. So let’s stop. It’s as easy as that. And if you can’t stop then focus that energy elsewhere. Take up smoking. It will grow the economy and is much better for you. Because if my choices are between being a Witch or being a Flying Monkey, I’d rather smoke.
