Study Hall Digest 4/22/2019

Notre Dame Twitter is Peak Twitter

If I were to teach a class at NYU about Twitter and how events are processed on the platform, I would use the Notre Dame fire as a prime example. The fire is the perfect phenomenon for people to project their ideas and biases onto because it is a very straightforward thing that does not, in itself, merit all that much analysis: A famous cathedral is on fire due to the fault of no one, because sometimes things catch fire. It quickly became the point of convergence for every potential response, from the sinister to the benign, processed in a hot take factory that imbues everything with meaning. Those responses included:

• Sharing vacation photos of the cathedral, making the event a participatory experience of grief that many suspected was performative, which led to two additional subsets of response — first, accusations of selfishness against the photo-sharers, who were making the fire about themselves, and then accusations against THOSE accusers of policing how people experience grief (???).
• Notre Dame as a metaphor for the state of the world, with a particular emphasis on the United States, i.e. “the fire is Donald Trump and Notre Dame is democracy.”
• Comparisons to 9/11, some of which were malicious and fueled by conspiracy theories while others were just commentary on the experience of watching the destruction of an iconic structure — which, IMO, is still extremely unnecessary. (YouTube didn’t help matters, putting up links to 9/11 articles under a livestream of the cathedral burning, which it attributed to an algorithm.)
• Far-right assholes held up the cathedral as symbolic of “Western civilization,” casting the fire as indicative of a clash between “the West” and Islam.
• Backlash to the overwrought sadness from people who went to Paris one time, with critics pointing to greater tragedies that did not trigger the same response, including the destruction of the rainforest, the war in Yemen, and the destruction of non-European cultural artifacts (which…fair)
• Backlash to THAT backlash, with people declaring that one can be sad about multiple things
• And finally, a truly shocking amount of Hunchback of Notre Dame fan art, mostly depicting Quasimodo crying over the burning building. This apparently merited a CNN article.

I think people fundamentally crave being a part of some collective experience, of looking at something from across the world and feeling they are qualified to join hands with others and share an emotional response. Notre Dame is a thing that is (a) culturally, historically and artistically significant and (b) iconic enough that just about everyone knows it on sight and many have been in person, so it naturally lends itself to that response (people are eager to show they GET IT). I also think Twitter pulls on users’ desire to have the CORRECT response, or the most original, or the most moral, so you end up with a glut of hot takes and warring backlash. Sometimes a building on fire is truly just a building on fire — but not on Twitter!

What Makes a “Book of the Year”?

The coverage around Sally Rooney’s “Normal People” has been…omnipresent. It is all anyone is talking about on Book Twitter, The Cut can’t stop writing about it, Vox called it the “Book of the Year,” and the Washington Post called Rooney the “voice of her generation” while asserting that her popularity lies in her ability to capture the Instagram age (a preoccupation with appearance over vulnerability). The book’s cover has also become something of a fixture on Instagram, with Refinery 29 questioning whether its appearance is an “Instagram status symbol.” (Rooney’s debut novel, “Conversations with Friends,” has garnered enthusiastic endorsements from Sarah Jessica Parker and Emily Ratajkowski).

Surely there is a confluence of factors here – yes, an Instagram-friendly book cover, but also an accessibility that lends itself to mass appeal. I’m only 100 pages in, but I feel comfortable saying it’s an easy read that is satisfying in its skillful rendering of universal relationship anxieties, and in its almost exclusive focus on the characters’ inner lives. It also reminds me of another hugely popular (and controversial) book, “A Little Life,” in that it sometimes deals in melodrama and cliche to convey some truth about human relationships or suffering. I guess it remains to be seen if the book’s virtues will be dogged by social media fatigue.

This Week in Media Assholes

Media Twitter this week got a little sneak preview of what to expect from the future two (already loathed) publications:

• LA Weekly, which is a shell of its former self after getting bought and gutted by Semanal Media, has hired a “cannabis editor” who calls himself the “Caucasian Gangster” and cannabis “Mother Nature’s Steve Jobs.” Very cool this guy has a job in media while the smartest people I know string together gigs to survive!!
• Writer, sommelier and “modern gentleman” Jason Tesauro made the very naive mistake of writing to Melissa Gira Grant to ask for her guidance in writing about this hunch he has that #MeToo is leading to more men “taking their lust to the back channels.” That went about as well for him as you would expect.
• Not that I ever had high hopes for New Gawker to begin with, but if the above is the quality of work we can expect I’m kind of bracing myself for a barely-disguised Quillette replica. Totally civil, no gross celebrity gossip, just people brave enough to voice unpopular opinions!

Longread of the Week: The New York Times Magazine published a fantastic feature on prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore and on the cause of prison abolition more broadly, which I’m hoping will make a compelling case to more readers of mainstream media.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Just weeks after its debut, Vice Live has been cancelled. Then the company laid off 10% of its workforce it said it would be reshuffling to prioritize television. Bizarrely, Vice has refused to confirm that Vice Live was, in fact, cancelled,  though staffers have made it pretty clear on Twitter.

— In keeping with an industry-wide trend, Huffington Post just launched a membership program. It won’t include a paywall, but there will be tiers of membership that readers can buy into for benefits like newsletters and t-shirts ( similar to BuzzFeed’s attempts to solicit donations by offering tote bags). With ad revenue slipping, loyal readers may be the best hope a lot of outlets have.

— Netflix is opening a sound stage in Bushwick, blocks from vegan diner Champs and the McKibbin Lofts…so we can expect more TV shows making use of that tourist-worthy graffiti?

— There are way, way too many subscription services, and people are tired of paying for all of them. I keep purchasing them to watch one show and then forgetting to unsubscribe and let me tell you they ADD UP.

— Quartz argues that while the new “digital divide” was once between those who had computers and those who did not, the divide is now between those who are savvy enough to opt out of algorithms and those who are not: “Opting out from algorithmic curation is a luxury—and could one day be a symbol of affluence available to only a select few.” It seems there will have to be a concerted effort to push for digital literacy so people can better understand how algorithms work. Of course, the onus should be on tech companies to provide this transparency in a way laymen can understand, but that seems unlikely, so I imagine that will fall to tech writers.

— Tech companies like Facebook use “data inference” to draw conclusions about the things you think you’re keeping private, like mental illness and sexual orientation. Creepy!