Best response I’ve seen yet to Bill & Emma Keller using their high-profile media platforms to sniff at a cancer patients’ tweets (“Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience?”) comes from Maureen O’Connor at NYMag:
… In the age of social media, when cell phones come with camera lenses optimized for selfies, that last question gets asked regularly. So I am going to answer it, once and for all: No. There is no such thing as TMI on the Internet. We are living in a post-TMI age, and everyone needs to deal with it. Preferably by using the “unfollow” button.
There is such a thing as too much information for you. There is such a thing as information the speaker will later regret. But if an audience is willingly and pleasurably consuming the information, then by definition, that is the right amount of information for them…. If you continually recoil at TMI, it’s because you lack the willpower to stop consuming (or foresight to avoid) the information in question. That’s your fault.
Modern media consumption — particularly digital media consumption — is personalized. This is sometimes to our detriment; it is very easy to surround yourself with the voices of only those who agree with you. As consumers of social media, we are all the programmers of our own personal line-ups, featuring a hand-selected set of soap operas, news sources, and other amusements. If a particular soap opera becomes boring, you click “unfollow” — or maybe you hate it so much that you block it. You can download browser extensions that will turn words you do not want to see into a big black bars, or prevent you from loading web pages that contain material that offends. For instance, if I never want to see or think about Bill or Emma Keller, I could install a content filter like Blocksi and set it to block or limit the amount of time I spend on web pages where the term Keller appears. Or I could set it simply to warn me about incoming Kellers, so that I can summon a third party to preview the material for me…
… In the age of micro-audience — when everyone is famous not for fifteen minutes, but to fifteen people — there is a consumer for everything. No exceptions….
My emphasis. I hadn’t realized there were so many tech-enabled ways to avoid seeing stuff I don’t like, but then, I find the scroll-down option sufficient for my unexacting needs.
Friday Morning Open Thread: “The Joy of Unfollowing”Post + Comments (52)