No Grand Pronouncements Here...: Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation

Abstract

Although there are numerous prominent examples of social media misuse, these cases should not disproportionately characterize the scope or potential of digital media participation as a whole. Using cancel culture as an entry point, this essay discusses how digital practices often follow a trajectory of being initially embraced as empowering to being denounced as emblematic of digital ills. However, while platforms such as Twitter do have characteristics that militate against nuanced debate, scholars can productively direct attention to interactions in other digital spaces, particularly using methods that yield more qualitatively informative data. These spaces include message boards and comment threads, which foster more long-form engagement. It is also important to look beyond the major English-language platforms, both to account for platform-specific features and so that conditions of online discourse routine in many global contexts, such as negotiating censorship, are centrally theorized in digital media studies.