“CANCEL CULTURE” has been a-WOKE-en by phone camera videos online

If I stuck this in the back pocket of my tight jeans, would it make my butt look fat ?

Technological Determinism is when you claim humanity has been changed more by a new technology than by a new way of thinking.

And it is something your college prof always warns you against evoking too readily.

Nevertheless, I am constantly struck by the fact that most WOKE slash CANCEL news stories begin with the two words “online video...”.

Both words are critical.

This CEO might have been a racist for many years without it harming his steady swim to the very top of the corporate slime pool.

People in the early 1990s might even have videoed his racist rants in action if they were in habit of carrying around a bulky VHS camcorder everywhere they went.

But nobody was - and so nobody did. If a racist tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it - or see it ?

Skip forward two decades and now everybody does carry a camcorder about : or rather, they almost all have portable pocket phones — with an incredibly sharp and incredibly tiny camcorder built into a tiny corner of it.

They carry the phone and its camera about everywhere and all the time.

So now they have a video of a CEO going postal on an Asian family in some dust-ridden small town in northern California —- so what ?

Or more accurately, besides the immediate family of the phone camera owner, who knows ?

This is where the second word ‘online’ comes in .

Online implies a lot of things.

For today, we will consider it as (A) allowing anyone to make digital material (our infamous cellphone video) available for anyone in the world to see, on something like this blog and (B) and allowing others to re-post that digital video content forward to still others and so on : the whole viral content process.

Now - confession time. Until I began blogging about Gabriel Wortman’s mass killing rampage and also commenting on various Wortman discussion groups on Facebook, this blog had absolutely no readers.

Zip - none.

I could have taken a video of this racist CEO and put it on my blog for all the world to see and he would have stayed in his job till he retired, perfectly safe.

But if I was a extremely minor Facebook activist who naturally attracts a few Facebook fans who are also minor activists, any FACEBOOK mention of the video, together with a link to it, would have started the ball rolling.

If my re-re-re-re-posted original Facebook entry and its infamous video eventually reached some social media biggie and they pushed it along, in a day or two we would learn of the CEO stepping down as a hot news item on Goggle News.

All of this without the gatekeepers of the traditional big media, with their barns full of fretful lawyers vetoing any story that had actually has news in it, being involved at all.

(Big shout out to the CBC !)

The media’s role is now limited to perfectly safely reporting the firing of the CEO.

This is why, in my view, the Cancel-Woke movement is as strong as it is today : the mainstream media’s “reporting” has mostly resulted in protecting the powerful, because the reporters’ editors always claim the evidence is “simply not strong enough to report”.

The media’s ‘stalling cum gatekeeper’ role is removed by the internet virus process : and because the  evidence is very strong, an audio and visual recording , the social media actually has real news at hand to report...