So I’m reading this article about Steve Harvey, his likely money-driven, crocodile-tear laden apology to Asian people, and how he’s basically being treated like an Uncle Tom piece of shit for being a racist and a Trump supporter,* and sure, it doesn’t necessarily help my opinion of him, but there’s one thing I can’t really get over: Harvey’s liberal use of writing his messages in a text file, screen capping them, and then posting images of his written messages onto Twitter, a messaging service.
*it’s amusing that being deemed a Trump supporter is considered an insult to the left
Now Steve Harvey is hardly the first person to do this, but because of my general recent disgust with him, along with the fact that he’s the most recent example of a person that does this makes him the poster boy for such ironic and narcissistic behavior.
So the current state of social media has evolved to where words have become the enemy, where people don’t want to read anything, and just want to look at shiny, blingy, animated sparkles MySpace-like images all day, without actually having to look at them on MySpace. Tumblr gif sites have risen while actual written blogs on WordPress or Blogger have become the minority, leading to the increasing use of the term longform to explain that it’s actually a form of writing that actually utilizes, writing.
Facebook has this weird priority system to where if your post is more than like a sentence, the font size plunges from obnoxious to legible, but then automatically proceeds to utilize a cut system to where only a fragment of your post will be readable without the necessity of another click or a press, to magically reveal the rest of your post.
And then we have Twitter, the world’s favorite social outlet, where words are not only the enemy, but are parsed down to where the words themselves are counted down by character, and if you can’t convey your message within 140 characters, you are automatically long-winded and an e-blabbermouth, and your opinion does not matter. Emojis have risen to expedite the current world of context-driven communication, when a few extra words would pinpoint and exact actual intent and definition.
So it’s especially ironic when people; celebrities or ordinary alike, feel the need to convey a really important message, that can’t be captured in an emoji, or 140 characters, or a gif from a popular television movie or an independent darling movie, are forced to resort to, words in order to do so.
But naturally, because we live in a world full of self-centered narcissists, people are completely incapable of doing, words, correctly, because they have the fear of god that nobody will see theirs. Which brings us to the obnoxious and ironic practice of composing words and presenting them as an image so that people can see a picture of words and hopefully might actually read them.
Look at Steve Harvey’s bullshit apologies and explanations; they were clearly written on an iPad, in standard Notes, based on the faux-paper background and the standard San Francisco typeface. As for his fake apologies to Asians, he writes two sentences of hollow words, signs it –SH(it), presses power-home to screen cap it, and slaps it up onto Twitter, complete with a mile of negative space uncropped, so we can see just how fast he whipped it up in the most minimal effort possible.
But then we get to his long-winded explanation with Mein Fuhrer, and this itself is an amusing display of care and curation of a statement; because he’s limited by image size, he’s very much held to a defined word limit, lest he writes to a point which necessitates a scroll, which then becomes defeated in the purpose to post a screen cap of his words onto Twitter. So despite the fact that he writes like a sixth grader, -SH(it) is careful to try and get as full of an explanation for his meeting with Trump without exceeding the boundaries of one full screen of Notes, so that it will all fit onto a singular Twitter post, even if comes at the expense of punctuation, grammar, or even a real point.
Let’s be real here though; -SH(it) probably didn’t actually write either. He makes enough money to where he doesn’t have to, and probably didn’t.
Still ironic though, that on a platform that allows for just 140 characters, people have resorted to taking pictures of statements that blow past 140 characters in order to get around the 140-character limit.
But that’s just Steve Harvey, and people like –SH(it), who use screen caps of words instead of words to convey their messages. Another obnoxiously ironic trend I’ve noticed recently, are people who not only post pictures of mundane words, but pictures of mundane words on top of obnoxious colorful gradients. Obviously done because they stand out like sore thumbs, but it’s like I’m scrolling through theFacebook, and seeing the usual litany of people who blurb, people who blab, people who repost, people who promote, etc. etc.; and then suddenly, there’s this big obnoxious colorful “image,” but then the words on top of it are something completely mundane and stupid like “La La Land was awesome!!!!!!” or “I’m going home, had a great time!!!” and then I’m all like what the fuck is the point of this?
I actually think text on rainbow pictures are worse, because it’s like taking the mindlessness of Twitter, and injecting a unicorn’s rainbow jizz and presenting words on top of that. It’s obviously done because it stands out in a field of “ordinary” text, but it’s passively saying “LOOK AT MY SHIT PLS” and “MY WORDS ARE IMPORTANT PLS LOOK AT THEM.”
The bottom line is, the social media world has discovered yet more ways to be obnoxious, narcissistic, and more disrespectful to the written word. Next thing you know, people will be taking selfies with their screen capped words, and posting those, when they have something they want to say, and 140 emoji characters isn’t obnoxious enough.
