Why do you want to cancel or delete something？You tried to defend what you're precious of? Recently, Cancel Culture has become a fad and caused an unavoidable problem.
What is Cancel Culture?
People try to cancel the appearance of someone, who usually has the power of influence, on the Internet due to that person's misbehavior and speech which have violated the social norms.
Why does Cancel Culture exist?
One of the reasons is that people want the person to truly regret what he/she did. In many cases, the company or celebrity thought that the public will forgive them after apologizing, even though they spread improper concepts, such as supporting racism. For avoiding this situation, the netizens may call for a protest on the Internet or require the company or sponsor to 'cancel' the celebrity. Take the argument of the Dolce & Gabbana commercial in 2018 as an example. D&G apologized for commercials that involved racism. However, netizens discovered that the designer of D&G insulted China in a chat on IG after a few days of apology. Apparently, D&G was compromised with profits instead of apologizing for humiliating cultures. Thus, the netizens called for canceling every D&G product from the shelves and promotion in order to have D&G sincerely apologize. From the example, it can be observed that Cancel Culture may be the result of evolving protest for protecting the culture which has been insulted. Netizens believe that only causing the profits loss and reputation damage can make a company genuinely regret and respect what they have despised. So Cancel Culture may be the choice of achieving the purpose.
An unavoidable issue in Cancel Culture
A possible issue is Cancel Culture will be the weapon of eradicating dissidents. As Cancel Culture is started by netizens' subjective judgment, the netizens who support canceling may be affected by personal feelings. So they will personal attack the target instead of against his/her misbehavior or offensive speech. Gustave Le Bon, a psychologist, noticed that impulsiveness and incapacity to reason are crowds' features. The crowd will be formed on the Internet during the process of calling to cancel something. With the crowd's growth, some people may transfer their negative feelings to the people with offensive speech and start to personally attack as they become impulsive in the crowd. Suppose people posted the incendiary information for canceling someone who doesn't deserve such a severe punishment. In that case, the crowd may 'attack' he/she for venting and are not aware that they become a weapon. Thus, the Cancel Culture will end up venting people's sense of resentment and be a weapon of eradicating dissidents.
Even though Cancel Culture may help someone realize that they are wrong, canceling someone is unwise as it is controlled by human's subjective thoughts affected by their feelings. So before you support canceling, have a second thought: are there other objective ways to stop the spread of improper concepts?
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