Social Media has Mindjacked You
The culture of our era is the absence of culture.
A lot of writers are producing blatant filler. They’re just throwing things at the internet and seeing what sticks. The majority of their focus is poured into engineering a headline that will trick the reader into scrolling through several paragraphs of this literary Kipple.
Every time a writer includes the word “shocking” in a headline, they should be shocked with 50,000 volts as penance for their crimes against the written word. Their headlines are always screaming at me through the screen like a Boomer that’s been denied an expired discount at Denny’s.
Most of what you see online is a carefully-crafted fiction, designed to grab your attention and elicit an emotional response. It’s incredibly easy to manipulate the narrative if you know the right buttons to press.
Writing is supposed to make you feel things. What it’s not supposed to do is manipulate your feelings to serve an agenda. That’s not writing, that’s propaganda.
A cherry-picked quote from an article you’ve never read to incite fear, a skewed statistic shown without context to spark anger, a snarky one-liner to cultivate rapport with the reader and get them to join in on mocking your opponent.
