The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Social Media

Last Sunday, a disturbing article found in the  

 New York Times was posted announcing that two male high school students were found guilty of raping a sixteen-year old girl. Almost all of the incriminating evidence came from YouTube videos and Facebook pictures taken by the perpetrators of the victim naked and passed out from too much alcohol. The evidence also included the boys’ text messages exclaiming that having sex with her was “like [having sex with] a dead body.” The word “dead” certainly destroys any argument that this was consensual sex.    

YouTube and Facebook sealed the boys’ fates in 2013.  In 1983, without the benefit of social media, the trial would have been the boys’ word against the girl’s and would have contained some flavor of the boys claiming the girl was looking for it.  Today, social media essentially prevented any use of the age-old defense that “the victim is to blame.”

While social media helped get justice, on the one hand, it also glamorized these boys and their victim, on the other. Once the incident went viral on YouTube and Facebook, a heinous crime became (at least temporarily) an alluring event with the parties to the act becoming reverse celebrities. Why does social media have the ability to glamorize awful events that if seen in person would cause us to look away?  

4 Pics 1 Word

 Many people have either seen, heard, or currently play the game 4 Pics 1 word. Just as the name connotes, this game portrays four images that represent a single word. While playing this game, I began to notice that each picture that contained a person was white; there were no colored people within this game. 

What are we suggesting when African-Americans are not included in these images?

A word functions as a principal carrier of meaning. As such, does this game imply African-Americans do not hold enough "substance" to represent that word?

Continuing on, in class we discussed how popular T.V. shows choose to have a majority white cast in order to please the overwhelming white audience. For this reason, is this game choosing to do the same, exclude people of color as to please the white users? Would this game still be as popular id African-Americans were in the pictures?

"(White) African Queen"

Over the past couple of days in class we have discussed how much, if any, has American society progressed in reaching equality. A majority of the class felt that while there have been signs of progress, such as an African-American becoming our president; we are definitely still not at the state of complete equality. Recently, a CNN video, posted that Numero Magazine contained an add titled “African Queen”, however, instead of an African-American modeling for this add, they hired a white 16-year old girl for the job, and painted her body with brown make up.

As you can imagine, this add received quite a lot of attention for its hypocrisy. However, one surprising comment that this article received was “Why hire a black model, when you can just paint a white one?” The use of the word “just” is very interesting because it is implying that the white model is the better choice, even though you are painting her skin to look exactly like an African-American model!

Another shocking fact is that the overwhelming majority of models are white, about 82%. While, only 6% of models are African-Americans. Models are seen as figures that society wants to copy or imitate. By choosing a white model to act as an African-American model, this magazine company is basically expressing that we should follow or be like white Americans, instead of an African-Americans. Why do you think that is? Or why choose a white model if she will just end up looking exactly like an African-American model? What do you think this add is saying about race in American society?

The lack of equality is truly being expressed within this magazine add, highlighting the fact that American society has still a lot of work ahead to reach a state of equality.