My all time favorite way to waste time is to scroll through twitter. It is my all time favorite social media and that is an opinion I share with millions of people. There is this thing that people call "twitter culture". Basically what this means is that there are things on twitter that are funny to (usually) only twitter users. People who don't understand twitter might not find the humor very humorous. Often times the jokes are pretty self deprecating and dark. There is a major trend of jokes that are usually from users who are college aged and the premises of the tweets is that the person is an alcoholic. It sounds weird, but if you are on twitter, you know exactly what I'm talking about. There are jokes about being unable to refrain from drinking for a night, or drinking a ton because they are depressed, or drinking till belligerent on a regular basis. It makes the excessive use of alcohol seem like a normal part of being a teenager. Normalizing this is a dangerous thing to the millions of impressionable teens using this social media platform. I also see this attitude of apathy towards alcohol dependency transfer into real life. If things are good, we drink. If things are bad, we drink. Pretty soon we are never not drinking. This dependence eventually forms, and no one even realizes it because it is happening to everyone and it is "normal"
Usually people say that the reason habitual smoking cigarettes spreads among the youth is because it is the 'cool' thing to do. That is not at all what I am observing. The twitter community is completely aware that some of the things they joke about on twitter may be pathetic or even sad. They just do not care. Nobody cares, because everyone is making the same jokes and everyone is participating in the same unhealthy hobbies. It has become a vibe, or an aesthetic, to have a twitter account where you talk about how depressing your life is and how you drink an unhealthy amount of alcohol to deal with your problems.
All in all, who's to say that college students wouldn't be drinking to drown their problems if there wasn't twitter.
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Hi susan,
ReplyDeleteI am also an avid Twitter user, yet I have not seen this culture on twitter referring to alcohol abuse. It is probably due to the fact that I follow a lot of politicians, sports, or other news forums. Still, I can understand what this culture may look like from experience on other types of social media. Sometimes humor is the best way to shed light on something that has become so normal for society and is difficult to recognize. Social Media has also heightened this sense of dark or crud humor. Humor in regards to serious subjects allows us to say, "Wow, can you believe we do this in our culture?", but it can also enable us to brush it off and many times move past it without any changes. Thanks for sharing this idea.
Cheers,
Caitlin
I go on Twitter every once in a while, usually to look at the humorous tweets and retweets from the people I follow. I see a lot of tweets about drugs, or funny videos of a "crackhead" who is doing something that appears funny to us. Other times I see tweets saying things like, "What you doing after smoking this" or "what you doing after taking this," and then they'll be a picture of someone doing some sort of unusual activity. To Twitter, these tweets are extremely funny. But I agree with you. These types of tweets can be dangerous when they become regular. It kind of goes to show that doing drugs is fun, hiding the dangers of drugs. If everyone is retweeting these tweets, then people on Twitter may begin to think that doing drugs is ok.
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