Public Feuding and Messy Social Media
How this OUT OF BALANCE discourse keeps more conflict alive than it resolves
2024 has been dubbed the year of exposure, accountability, and justice. While any day, any time, any year is right for JUST exposure and JUST accountability, 2024 might just be the year when decades-long warnings and pleas finally break through to the masses. With all the mess unearthed in 2023 and the ability for stories and opinions to go viral almost instantly, surely the levees will break in 2024 across all verticals including politics, entertainment, and religion just to name a few. So will 2024 indeed be the year or will it be just like any other year? In terms of justice and accountability for wrongdoing, I certainly hope so.
What I don’t hope for is exposure that merely perpetuates public feuding, online messiness, and hollow opinions. We certainly can do without all of that.
However with the way 2024 has started, it looks like we are in for more of the latter. Like 24 million others, I watched an interview that I wasn’t ready for during this first week of 2024. I actually watched it as it premiered on January 3rd because I caught the teaser just in time and happened to be available. Though I didn’t expect it to be nearly three hours!! That’s what happens when you watch a YouTube premiere, the thumbnail doesn’t show the run time. The interview I’m speaking of is between comedian, Katt Williams, and the host of the Club Shay Shay podcast, Shannon Sharpe.
The teaser said this interview would break the internet. Upon watching the interview, particularly the first 30 minutes, I couldn’t help but agree that it would indeed break the internet. Even though I had a strong sense of how the interview would be received by others after watching it, I didn’t know how I felt about it after watching it. I read through comments and thought perhaps I would leave a comment but realized I couldn’t put my words together. So after a few days of reflecting and listening to others’ reactions, I can finally articulate how I feel and what I think.
On the actual merits of Katt’s grievances, I’m not that much of an entertainment and comedy insider to know who is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My instinct tells me that Katt was probably truthful. But considering that I can’t make heads or tails of the substance, all I’m left to assess is how productive this conversation was. What was his objective? What problem was he trying to solve?
He said outright that he came to set the record straight about what other comedians said when they visited the Club Shay Shay podcast and he said that his overall purpose is to expose. Setting the record straight about his work and contributions, I have no problem with. How he went about setting the record straight is a topic for another day as I am not a proponent of shock and awe; tear the WHOLE thing down type of approaches. But again that is a topic for another day.
The mission to expose is where I believe the tactic of public feuding is ineffective. From the interview we can conclude that he wanted to expose individuals that he believes to have sold their souls and compromised their integrity to advance their careers. There are three questions that I have about this particular mission:
Was the point of this exposure to simply show that the public personas of many admirable entertainers do not match their personal and professional reality?
Was the intent of this exposure to imply that these entertainers have compromised their integrity and continue the systemic abuse of power by putting others in compromising situations?
Was the goal of this exposure to take on the underlying abusive power structures that put these entertainers in compromising situations in the first place?
Some may believe that all three of these were objectives of the mission. Assuming that to be the case, my next question is how effective was his tactical approach to the interview? Of these three objectives, 2 and 3 are probably of the highest order and sadly to me, that’s what got lost in the tactical sauce. These two particular objectives are the most consequential and can affect change for the greater good. Instead the larger conversation that has ensued centers on the entertaining drama of conflict. It will live it’s life in the headlines until it is overtaken by some other titillating story. While what precipitated the conflict remains buried underneath, never properly addressed and abusers survive yet another day.
I will close out this post by saying that as a society, we make the mistake of conflating our ability to AIR our grievances with our ability to SETTLE our grievances. We make the mistake of conflating the egotistical satisfaction that comes from our ability to witfully and artfully expose, feud, debate, battle, diss, etc., with our ability to actually resolve conflict. We’ve conflated relevance with the ability to remain in the headlines. We are incentivized to keep drama alive. Being messy is entertaining, therefore profitable and in the minds of some, justifiable.
We pride ourselves in our ability to play the game. Never mind that the game is often rigged; never mind that the game can be toxic; never mind that the game is abusive; never mind that the game tends to produce more casualties than WHOLE winners.
Now I want to believe that what I just said was part of the message that Katt wanted to convey. But you tell me if that’s what 24+ million people are talking about? Yeah we’re out of balance.
Onward to Harmonious Balance,
Johanna
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