A Change in Discourse: Society Communicates in New Ways

In today’s society everyone has to be put in a bubble, right? Well many social medias think this by changing basically everyday on the fact that they think somebody might feel offended. Take into account that Apple, a big manufacturer of today’s phones, has changed the gun emoji  to a squirt gun. Now it is understandable that they would of done this due to the recent shootings in the past year, but if the gun emoji itself is too violent, why not get rid of the bomb and knife emoji – they’re violent too, right? The one problem with keeping it as a squirt gun is, other systems other than iOS still have a gun which may bring confusion and multiple accounts. Apple hasn’t done all bad, as it has added a gay pride flag within the rest of the emojis. Apple plans to create a solution to all the confusion.

Another point of interest should be that YouTube has had a HUGE change recently that has shut down many channels, and has demonetized many big YouTubers videos. YouTube has changed its Terms Of Service, which put into effect new rules. One of these big rules is tagging. Now let’s say you have an Anti-Suicide video, right? It’s not so bad, but since you have suicide in the title, your video will be taken down. Now you can see where YouTube was going with these new rules but they completely used it in a wrong way. This rule alone has unfairly taken peoples videos down from YouTube, because of tags or what they had said in their video. There was another rule put into YouTube which was brought into good intentions but entirely not so. This rules idea was if you did a collaboration with another channel, and the video on their channel got flagged, you would get a strike with them. Now this is a big deal because YouTube has a three strike system, meaning three strikes your channel gets shut down. This would result in some unfair shutdowns, because you could tag a big YouTuber channel in your video then get flagged and they can’t appeal. In YouTube’s new flagging system, they hardly look at the cases they strike first then figure things out later. YouTube has done nothing to come out with these problems, and has not even brought the subject of the unfair flagging. They make it seem as if nothing is happening. YouTube has just been putting people in the dark with this whole situation.

Human emotion has influenced countless changes and will forever be an important part of society, and has influenced countless of decisions. But have we gone too far? It now controls every aspect of our society, it’s run by our emotions and our insecurities. In my opinion if our emotions can interact with every aspect of our society, in example: Education, Policing of our streets as well as our communication with other people in person and online. Social interaction is now limited to short and meaningless conversation. That is often ended by the slightest improper phrase or saying that could “Trigger” the other person. Conversation is the most import thing to people because it the way we express our ideas. Without it all civilized and intelligent conversation goes extinct. The Issue that we face from all of this is that we can no longer operate our society without having to bend to the whims of people that find everyday things too inappropriate and cannot see other’s opinions as helpful only as a detriment to what they are trying to say. If people cannot accept and absorb other people’s opinion and are only capable of accepting their own opinion as the immediate truth, it develops a great divide that will split people apart whether it be political, social or religious. Which is the worst possible thing for a country divided by terrorism and two fools trying to take control of it.