Cancel Culture

CANCEL CANCEL CULTURE CULTURE

By: Noëllie Inard Entertainment Editor

In our world of social injustice, people online have become more aware and involved in fighting against unfairness and inequality. Through the years and with the development of social media, people have found a way to raise their voices to denounce the wrongdoings of important people or institutions.

When coming together, people have one of the most powerful tools, which is boycotting and denouncing. This can lead to ”canceling” people's social status. According to www.meriamwebster.com, cancel culture is defined as “[...] a practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.”

Cancel culture usually starts on social media and is a way to call out someone for acting or speaking unacceptably while also boycotting them at the same time. Usually, the victims of cancel culture are celebrities or people with some kind of fame that would be harmed by being canceled.

As common people, we tend to put celebrities on a pedestal and expect more from them since they have a lot of exposition and an audience that’s directly influenced by them. While cancel culture can seem harsh in certain situations, it can also shed light on people's wrongdoings. This movement has been similar to other movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo that called out influential people’s actions and words. The power imbalance used to keep people silent. Now, with the rise of social media, people can now come together and raise their voices.

In its positive output, cancel culture has held policemen accountable for killing black people, famous entertainment producers for sexually assaulting actresses and famous people for their homophobic, racist or sexist comments. Cancel culture can be a powerful tool for people to raise their voices and counter the power imbalance in society.

Though it is nothing but positive to see people becoming more aware of microaggressions and bad jokes that used to be the standard, there are also downfalls which have led to extreme measures. People have now developed a rigid way of thinking and do not condemn mistakes or the possibility for others to educate themselves and improve as humans. There is no room to acknowledge that people are raised differently or come from different cultures that don’t have the same norms or exposure to different subjects.

Now it is either you act perfectly and say the right things or you get canceled. In this regard, some famous people have seen their social status and reputation disappear for things that seem to not deserve that harsh of a consequence. In the same way, there is no “innocent until proven guilty” anymore, and people’s lives have been destroyed because of the tendency for online people to take rumors as facts.

I asked one of the university students, senior Sarah Vandermolen, what she thought of cancel culture. She responded by saying that, “Although it is good to see people come forward when something has to be denounced, it can sometimes be extreme with people threatening celebrities, leaving hate comments or leaving death threats.”

Many people are beginning to see that cancel culture may be overly used or create a false perception that people online are some kind of "god" over others’ social status and reputation.