Juno News - December 28, 2019


A Decade in Review – Social Media

Topics
social media toxicity
Mentioned
Mark Zuckerberg Don Cherry Joe Allen
Trudeau wants to mandate Canadian content on Netflix Trudeau and Morneau don't seem to care about the economy

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

204.54

Word count

823

Sentence count

48


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of we look back at the past decade in social media, from the early days of MySpace to the rise of social media and the toxicity that came with it, and what we can learn from it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So continuing these looks at decade in review issues, I think one of the big things that we
00:00:11.060 cannot avoid is social media. Now social media didn't come along in 2010, although I didn't
00:00:16.820 notice on my Twitter feed it said you first joined in 2010, so I'm unfortunately celebrating
00:00:21.740 a decade on Twitter. Thank you to those of you who engage with me in a productive way,
00:00:25.980 but I gotta say 10 years of just watching people go out there and try and get random people fired
00:00:32.460 because they made an imperfect remark. Let's fire Don Cherry. Let's fire the other one, Jess Allen. I
00:00:37.560 wasn't on board with that either. Let's get this person named and shamed and everything. You know,
00:00:41.720 stop the ride. I want to get off. This thing was supposed to bring people together. Instead,
00:00:47.320 it's pushed people apart and just enhanced the toxicity in our lives. 2010, that's when I joined
00:00:53.320 Twitter. Facebook, I remember joining it in 2005. It was first made available to Harvard where Mark
00:00:59.660 Zuckerberg was of course attending and then a few more universities were given access to it. Yet to
00:01:03.840 have actually a university email address like a harvard.edu and in my case at University of Toronto
00:01:09.820 is utoronto.ca and if you didn't have that email, you couldn't register for Facebook. So I was one of
00:01:15.500 the early ones and it was a really fun time back then. I think it really did bring people closer
00:01:20.720 together. Talking about different parties that you go to and oh, here's a house party. Let's check
00:01:26.280 that out and then you would meet someone at a party and then you follow out. You go, oh, I'm going to
00:01:30.140 message them because I really like that person, a friend to make or someone to ask out on a date
00:01:34.760 or what have you and it was like a really cool hip happening thing and then Facebook also kind of
00:01:40.220 changed. Everybody got on board. It became a global village. It became a place talking about politics
00:01:45.120 and look, I'm so glad that we have this ability, this non-traditional media to talk about politics
00:01:51.060 and the things that matter. People who feel they are not represented of course by traditional media
00:01:56.960 are people who want to get their own voices out there and you've seen a lot of people who have
00:02:00.780 been able to go out and say things that, well, they have something to say. They want to go out
00:02:05.820 there. Communities meeting microcosms, whether you're a big hockey fan or Star Trek fan or whatever,
00:02:11.460 there's all sorts of online communities out there and that's the positive part of social media and
00:02:17.120 that's still happening and that was what predominated though. That was sort of the heavy
00:02:22.600 part of it back when it first happened in 2005. MySpace was all about, hey, I got a band. I want
00:02:29.320 to share my music with you. I'm this earnest young musician. Listen to my composition and people go,
00:02:34.060 oh, great band. Good song, man. Two thumbs up for you. I'll buy your song on iTunes. I don't know if
00:02:38.740 iTunes was around then, but you get the point. And then those things, you see less and less of that
00:02:43.760 and you see more and more of that toxicity and that let's get them. You know, I've written a few
00:02:49.360 times over the years about occasions when I go on Christmas break or when I go on summer break and
00:02:54.500 I'm away for like a week or two weeks or I'm out of the country or on the other side of the world
00:02:58.120 and I don't have access to high-speed Wi-Fi or I just, you know, I turn the device off. And I feel
00:03:03.000 like that's when I become like most myself, most relaxed and content and just happy with the
00:03:10.560 whole human experience when you just take a step away and plug out of the madness for a bit. And
00:03:16.960 I have people write to me and say, yes, you know, I have the same experience. I think a lot of people
00:03:21.100 are thinking along that line. So we love our devices. We love that we can connect like this and talk about
00:03:26.340 the issues that matter. But boy, this past decade, social media has really turned in
00:03:31.800 to social mania. And I guess the question, I don't have an answer to this at all, is in this next
00:03:37.560 decade, are we going to find a way to navigate it more productively without just needing to fire and
00:03:44.100 hashtag away anybody who says a slightly off-color remark? Are we going to improve upon that or is it
00:03:51.160 going to get worse? I hope it's going to get better. But so far I've seen human nature doesn't
00:03:55.660 necessarily fare too well when it gets on there in social media. What do you think? Let me know.