Since the beginning of the year, our runway has been filled with a constant stream of stories about how “canceling” a runway was the correct social response to the news that the show’s cast and crew had been caught in a sexual harassment scandal. The reactions, the reactions, and the reactions. We’ve been inundated with this story for two weeks now, and it is starting to wear on us.
I think to cancel culture (and its more recent iterations like "#MeToo" and "Hate Speech") can be summed up by The Onion's "The Dumbest Show on Earth." It goes like this: If you don't like a person or a show, you can cancel it. At least that's what "Cancel Culture" has done.
This story, and its many variants, is one of the main reasons we started this site.
As you may have heard, and as it turns out, many of our readers have come to our pages to cancel their subscriptions to our local newspaper. The article we're talking about is a little bit more nuanced than that. The person accused of committing the assault is still on our local paper, but she has been replaced by a new person, so she's still a person, but she's now a woman.
This is only a small part of what it means to see the cancel culture phenomenon in our local papers. It is also the reason we started this site. We found that cancel culture had a significant impact on the newspaper itself because it is an issue that is so much more than just canceling a subscription.
It's about changing the way people think about our local paper.
The way people think about our local papers and local news is changing for the better. A lot of people are seeing how the cancel culture phenomena are impacting the way they approach local news. There are things that they like that they don’t like, and I think we’ve all seen some of the same things that we’re seeing on this site.
The cancel culture phenomenon is changing so much because of the advent of social media; people are getting around to canceling themselves out of their social media accounts. If they don't like the way something is going, they can simply cancel it; they don't have to feel bad for canceling.
The cancel culture phenomenon is a term coined to describe a phenomenon of what happens when the attention economy takes over and everything has to be done online. The term is from a book of the same name by the sociologist Robert Putnam. It has been around for a while, but it's an increasing trend that has become more apparent in the last few years.
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