November 2018

gritty teens and pepe teens

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Blogger Carl Beijer wonders who's actually on twitter, or at least, how influential it is. Not sure what prompted this but it might have something to do with all the mainstream journalists who obsessively discuss "what twitter is thinking" or believe it's significant when "twitter erupts." How much thought leading is really going on over there? Says Beijer:

[N]ot everyone, it turns out, uses Twitter to talk about the news:

--One recent survey shows that only about 11% of the population ever gets their news from Twitter.

--Among respondents who ever use social media to get the news there is also significant variation in consumption: for instance, 30% of that group say that they "hardly ever" get their news from social media. If these trends holds for Twitter, then it is probably a significant source of news for something closer to 3-8% of US adults.

Beijer concludes with this paragraph:

This, I think, is a much more realistic assessment of Twitter's news reach: bring together all of the blue check journalists and unverified posters, the sinister operatives and the doe-eyed normies, the Pepe teens and the Gritty teens, the #TCOT grandpas and rose emojis - put them all together, and you are reaching a single-digit percentage of US adults, somewhere between 3-8%.

This hairball of newspeak might send a Twitter-unobsessed reader to the Urban Dictionary. A few people I asked didn't know what "Gritty teens" meant. Email if you have an idea.

edits after posting

Update: Thanks to Rubbercat for emailing a Gritty teens explanation: "'Gritty teens' refer[s] to an emerging contingent of meme-loving leftist kids. Its namesake is the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team's new mascot Gritty who, after a few initial weeks of universal revulsion, became jokingly recharacterized as this hip ultra-leftist antifa hero in photoshops and memes. There was a counterprotest recently and Gritty was on a lot of the signs."

viewers must be informed

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Online art zine Hyperallergic reports that artist Michelle Hartney has "post[ed] guerrilla wall labels next to the artwork of Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso [in the Metropolitan Museum], calling out their abusive or misogynistic histories."
This is a very conservative gesture, assuming that images have an innate, necromantic power to infect viewers with bad politics, requiring written counter-incantations.
It's also the spirit of the hall monitor, similar to fundamentalist Christians flagging or expurgating scenes in Hollywood films that don't agree with their worldview.
There is also a kicking the dog quality to this. Can't stop that politician from groping staffers? Go annotate some century-old art and feel better about yourself.

Below this image of Gauguin's "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel" appears an imaginary Hartney wall label. Enjoy!

gauguin620

Paul Gauguin's bullying was intellectual as well as personal, as seen in his famous hounding of the gentle Vincent Van Gogh. Gauguin saw women as objects, and eventually pursued a stereotypical Western tourist dream of moving to Tahiti to indulge his appetite for submissive native flesh. The price of his toxic masculinity was dying poor, with syphilis.
The meaning of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel is ultimately unclear, but given Gauguin's misogyny, it's significant that he depicts the women of Brittany in traditional head-coverings; likely he approved of this. The women have convened to watch a Biblical allegory of two males wrestling. Undoubtedly Gauguin was comfortable with such rituals of colonialist subjugation.