The imaginary, destructive power of social media | Living | johnsoncitypress.com

It’s very easy these days to say that social media is toxic. People act in ways they’d never do in real life, because it isn’t real life. They act like feral wolves, because they can. The Twitter police don’t carry guns, and their badges are imaginary.In fact, social media is one big imaginary world, and we’re all way too wrapped up in things that don’t matter — the opinions expressed by strangers in public.Last week, Jon Gruden’s life exploded because of some private email exchanges that he had between 2011 and 2018 with a colleague. The emails included comments that were objectively racist, sexist and homophobic, and it’s hard to figure out how to defend them. You really can’t. Gruden doesn’t.But they were private conversations between two men, and they became public because of a wholly separate investigation into another individual suspected of wrongdoing. Gruden, who was not the target of that investigation, became the victim of what we’ve all seen over the past few years, something I call the Twitch Hunt. When the private comments became public, Gruden was essentially turned into a non-person. Matt Taibbi had a great column where he described Gruden as becoming increasingly invisible, like…
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