i. The bra colour was originally "let's confuse boyses with our sekrit teehee", with someone adding the breast cancer bit to lend it some legitimacy. (C.f. meme mutating)
The bra colour was originally "let's confuse boyses with our sekrit teehee", with someone adding the breast cancer bit to lend it some legitimacy. (C.f. meme mutating)
With or without the breast cancer thing, I thought it pointless and irritating. (Sorry to all the women reading this who part in it. This is not a comment on them, just on the meme). Plus, a good percentage of my Facebook friends page are male friends, who are good chaps and don't deserve to be confused for no good reason. Plus, who's interested in knowing someone else's bra colour, anyway? Unless they're asking 'what colour bra do you wear under that top/dress so it doesn't show up?'
I wasn't confused. I didn't really think about it, I saw it on Twitter and assumed that it was people posting random colours - why should there need to be a reason for that? :-)
Thinking about this some more (it is side-on to my study actually) I find it intriguing that in the old mailed chain letters, the pressure to propagate the meme was that bad stuff would happen to *you*, the receiver. The pressure from these social media memes is different - it's all public, so the hook is that you're made to feel that you must be SEEN supporting the subject of the meme, because not propagating it means you don't care about the subject.
Ooh, yes, that's a very good point. It's the same thing with FaceBook invitations to groups - if you don't join or become a fan of the group "Paedophilia is bad", does that mean you are supporting paedophilia?
So it extends to a much wider context than just chain letters/memes. There's a public expectation of conformity that leads to an unthinking lip service. All surface and no substance.
It would be interesting to see how much people in general feel pressurised about these things, and whether it could be argued that this sort of conformity pressure is surpressing something.
Interesting. I commented on your FB status (before reading this) "at least they didn't do the "something bad will happen to you if you don't pass it on" thing"; but I didn't think about why. I think you have it there....
As far as I could tell, that bra colour was just a silly meme game until someone tried to past a social cause onto it. It sure wasn't presented like that to me, and I got it in my inbox at the very start of that silliness.
I HATE LOATHE WANT TO SET ON FIRE stupid emotional manipulation in the form of '93% of people don't care about cancer awareness, do you?' because that's what it is really implying.
Although my understanding was that the breast cancer link to the bra colours came later, I'm now starting to see the following in the FB status of some women I know:
Ladies, your red, black,pink, blue, white, butterflied, cheetah printed, and nude bra colors made the news tonight. Facebook doesn't know who started it going but the Susan G Komen foundation says it was a great way to raise awareness for breast cancer. Way to go! Post this on your wall - if you participated in the Bra Color Game!
I have no idea whether it's genuine or not (especially since I never saw the email/message going around among women), but I doubt it.
*twitch* Komen: taking awareness too far since (at least) pink kitchen appliances.
Yes, breast cancer's pretty horrible, but so's a lot of other cancers, and also a lot of other diseases. And I feel that awareness for those is getting shoved out of the way by an overhead of pink ribbons.
Hah, yes, that's actually one thing I was about to add and then left out because I didn't want to launch into a huge rant ot anything ^^ I'll bite.
Of course you're right, boobs are awesome (I own a pair, so I know what I'm talking about ^^).
Which is exactly why this pisses me off so much. Do people (in general, the sheeple) really care about the women who have breast cancer, and the impact it has on their lives and health and body image an psyche and so forth? Or are the boobs more important than the ones who bear them?
Were I charitable, I'd say that since breasts are culturally a female attribute, an ailment afflicting breasts is seen as an assault on the female sex, which evokes both culturally inherited chivalric instincts, surpressed love of mother's breasts and the comforts of childhood, and the fear of losing one's mate, all of which stir feelings of protectiveness.
But mostly I think it's a matter of breasts (for the reasons listed above, and because they are, as you say, awesome) being a very effective attention-grabber.
A headline saying "Breast cancer screenings to increase" reads as "BOOBS!!! something something something"
Meh, I feel like a cynical b-word today. The discoursing mentioned in my other comment farther down went pretty well, all things considered, but I think it wore out my debate-gland for today.
She had a tremendous impact - because she took back ownership of her breasts in public. They're not just there to attract male fans (and thus must be presented in the manner pleasing to the eyes of said males), they're _hers_. It used to be that having a breast amputated was something women were supposed to be ashamed off, and which they had to hide so as not to offend male onlookers, and I think we're finally making inroads on that.
I'm really annoyed at the "Find a cure for cancer now!" thing.
First of all, there cannot be "a cure", as it's not a single-cause disease, or even a single disease. AFAIUI, every type of cell has its own cancer, and some have multiple cancer types. People seem to think it's an infected disease, and that it can be cured by finding a way to neutralise some pathogen.
Secondly, the scientists are doing their best. It's not as if they're sitting around drinking martinis in the lab until one day one of them will say "Hey, guys, there are a lot of people on LiveJournal who think we should crack this one. Shall we give it a shot?"
I was going to post something very similar to this, and still might.
Not only do repost social cause memes irritate me, but they allow people to show vague support for whatever social cause it is without actually thinking. How often do people repost something they don't actually believe all of?
Not only do repost social cause memes irritate me, but they allow people to show vague support for whatever social cause it is without actually thinking.
Yes. I thought the same on Twitter when people started colouring their icons green in support of (I seem to remember) Iran. Or adding a 'support Gary McKinnon'[1] message to their icon. It's not like the US government are going to say "Okay, lots of people on Twitter are supporting this guy, so we won't drag him over here for a trial," is it?
[1] Ukian chap with Aspergers, who hacked into various US Security Departments (I'm a bit sketchy on the details here) and is likely to be extradited to the US to be tried.
Interesting collection of comments, so far. Interesting discussion topic, as well, but I shun facebook and the journals I follow hardly do this kind of stuff, so I mostly dodge this without even noticing. Thanks to all who explained the bra colour shenanigans of which so far I'd only heard second or third hand babble.
Interesting tough, that you should post this today. I've spent half my day emailing back an forth with a friend, heavily citing and linking several blog posts and accompanying comments. Certainly not the same as reposting, and the cause is one that is near to my heart, even though I often neglect it in favor of topics that have a more immediate impact on my life at this time.
The current one, with the 93% remark, really does cross the line for me - it feels to me like emotionally blackmailing people into doing something without even thinking about what it's *about*. I'll bloody well support the causes *I* choose - there's no way to support them all explicitly without it becoming totally meaningless anyway - and in *my* way, which might be discussing it with people, or posting something *I* wrote on the subject, or donating to some charity, or whatever, but blindly C&P'ing to me only seems to *decrease* awareness as the topics get more and more lost in the noise of all the other thoughtless reposts.
I do find it somewhat ironic, though, that so many people have posted something about their annoyance with this meme and similar memes today. At least there's not been a C&P meme about it yet, as far as I can tell ;)
Yes. Now, if someone posted this meme out of a genuine desire to be heard, or to show/remind people that cancer is everywhere and no-one remains unaffected by it, then I have absolutely no qualms with that. More power to them, in fact.
It's when their message gets lost by people hopping on the cancer-bandwagon that it starts irking me. And when there's an added element of 'if you don't send this to five of your friends, your grandma will die of testicular cancer!1!eleventy', I start seeing red.
And it is so insidious. It starts with one person trying to send a message, others pick up on it and at some point, peer pressure happens. So you end up with people C&Ping messages like these and feeling good about it (because they've done something and they've conformed), not realising that what they're doing is not boosting the signal, but creating more noise.
It also reminds me of the inflation of 'minutes of silence'. It used to be that when something bad happened, people would hold a collective minute of silence. For Really Huge Recurring Things it'd be two minutes. But these days it seems like every event needs a minute more than the previous one. Ten people getting killed in a traffic accident might get as much as 5 minutes - while the whole of WW2 is still stuck with two minutes. This seems disproportional, as well as harder and harder to actually do. Who in today's society still has the willpower to actually shut the * up for 2 minutes, let alone 5?
And then there is the thing with the bracelets a few years back. Did it start with yellow ones for cancer? I can't remember. Then every cause - including some specific forms of cancer - each got their own colour bracelets, and some colours were even used several times. To keep up, you'd require your entire lower arm covered in coloured bracelets, and oh horror, you might accidentally leave one out! Everyone will think you're an uncaring unsensitive bitch/bastard! (I didn't actually see that happen in my environment but it must have somewhere, it was most definitely going that way...)
I wonder whether we don't really have the silence thing in .uk, or whether I'm just oblivious - the only one I'm really aware of still is remembrance day (not WW2 specifically, in fact the date & time here is aligned with the end of WW1), and even that one seems to be observed less and less, as I tend to moan each year.
Re the bracelets... before the first bracelet there was a similar thing, which was poppies. I don't know if that happens outside .uk? In case not - poppies are worn in early November as a mark of remembrance for war dead. I'm not sure when it started, but it's been around for considerably longer than my lifetime. Not wearing one, in some contexts, is a big faux pas. No newsreader or politician could be without one, and in some businesses the same applies. Then inflation started to set in, and some politicians started escalating the *size* of their poppies, until some were almost comically large. And then we got all the bracelets. And the ribbons. And the white poppies, come to think of it. And yes, it starts to devalue them all.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 09:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:00 am (UTC)ii. 97% of all statistics used are made up.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 12:27 pm (UTC)With or without the breast cancer thing, I thought it pointless and irritating. (Sorry to all the women reading this who part in it. This is not a comment on them, just on the meme). Plus, a good percentage of my Facebook friends page are male friends, who are good chaps and don't deserve to be confused for no good reason.
Plus, who's interested in knowing someone else's bra colour, anyway? Unless they're asking 'what colour bra do you wear under that top/dress so it doesn't show up?'
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:09 pm (UTC)great point
Date: 2010-01-13 12:55 am (UTC)Re: great point
Date: 2010-01-13 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 02:02 pm (UTC)Thinking about this some more (it is side-on to my study actually) I find it intriguing that in the old mailed chain letters, the pressure to propagate the meme was that bad stuff would happen to *you*, the receiver. The pressure from these social media memes is different - it's all public, so the hook is that you're made to feel that you must be SEEN supporting the subject of the meme, because not propagating it means you don't care about the subject.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 02:17 pm (UTC)So it extends to a much wider context than just chain letters/memes. There's a public expectation of conformity that leads to an unthinking lip service. All surface and no substance.
It would be interesting to see how much people in general feel pressurised about these things, and whether it could be argued that this sort of conformity pressure is surpressing something.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:01 am (UTC)I HATE LOATHE WANT TO SET ON FIRE stupid emotional manipulation in the form of '93% of people don't care about cancer awareness, do you?' because that's what it is really implying.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 04:11 pm (UTC)Ladies, your red, black,pink, blue, white, butterflied, cheetah printed, and nude bra colors made the news tonight. Facebook doesn't know who started it going but the Susan G Komen foundation says it was a great way to raise awareness for breast cancer. Way to go! Post this on your wall - if you participated in the Bra Color Game!
I have no idea whether it's genuine or not (especially since I never saw the email/message going around among women), but I doubt it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 04:36 pm (UTC)*twitch* Komen: taking awareness too far since (at least) pink kitchen appliances.
Yes, breast cancer's pretty horrible, but so's a lot of other cancers, and also a lot of other diseases. And I feel that awareness for those is getting shoved out of the way by an overhead of pink ribbons.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 04:50 pm (UTC)Of course you're right, boobs are awesome (I own a pair, so I know what I'm talking about ^^).
Which is exactly why this pisses me off so much. Do people (in general, the sheeple) really care about the women who have breast cancer, and the impact it has on their lives and health and body image an psyche and so forth? Or are the boobs more important than the ones who bear them?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:02 pm (UTC)But mostly I think it's a matter of breasts (for the reasons listed above, and because they are, as you say, awesome) being a very effective attention-grabber.
A headline saying "Breast cancer screenings to increase" reads as "BOOBS!!! something something something"
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:17 pm (UTC)Meh, I feel like a cynical b-word today. The discoursing mentioned in my other comment farther down went pretty well, all things considered, but I think it wore out my debate-gland for today.
I think I'll go lie down for a bit now ^^
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-14 11:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 09:55 am (UTC)First of all, there cannot be "a cure", as it's not a single-cause disease, or even a single disease. AFAIUI, every type of cell has its own cancer, and some have multiple cancer types. People seem to think it's an infected disease, and that it can be cured by finding a way to neutralise some pathogen.
Secondly, the scientists are doing their best. It's not as if they're sitting around drinking martinis in the lab until one day one of them will say "Hey, guys, there are a lot of people on LiveJournal who think we should crack this one. Shall we give it a shot?"
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:13 am (UTC)I'm still waiting for my rocket car, by the way.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 12:31 pm (UTC)(With a producer who won't recast all the characters as teenagers, set it on Earth in Modern Times and turn it into Twilight would be favourite.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 02:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 01:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:51 am (UTC)Not only do repost social cause memes irritate me, but they allow people to show vague support for whatever social cause it is without actually thinking. How often do people repost something they don't actually believe all of?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 12:23 pm (UTC)Yes. I thought the same on Twitter when people started colouring their icons green in support of (I seem to remember) Iran. Or adding a 'support Gary McKinnon'[1] message to their icon. It's not like the US government are going to say "Okay, lots of people on Twitter are supporting this guy, so we won't drag him over here for a trial," is it?
[1] Ukian chap with Aspergers, who hacked into various US Security Departments (I'm a bit sketchy on the details here) and is likely to be extradited to the US to be tried.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 12:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 02:29 pm (UTC)Interesting tough, that you should post this today. I've spent half my day emailing back an forth with a friend, heavily citing and linking several blog posts and accompanying comments. Certainly not the same as reposting, and the cause is one that is near to my heart, even though I often neglect it in favor of topics that have a more immediate impact on my life at this time.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 03:26 pm (UTC)I do find it somewhat ironic, though, that so many people have posted something about their annoyance with this meme and similar memes today. At least there's not been a C&P meme about it yet, as far as I can tell ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 04:19 pm (UTC)93% of people won't bother following up to this meme, but if you're one of the 7% who hate C&P memes, cut and paste it into your journal..
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:38 pm (UTC)It's when their message gets lost by people hopping on the cancer-bandwagon that it starts irking me. And when there's an added element of 'if you don't send this to five of your friends, your grandma will die of testicular cancer!1!eleventy', I start seeing red.
And it is so insidious. It starts with one person trying to send a message, others pick up on it and at some point, peer pressure happens. So you end up with people C&Ping messages like these and feeling good about it (because they've done something and they've conformed), not realising that what they're doing is not boosting the signal, but creating more noise.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:56 pm (UTC)And then there is the thing with the bracelets a few years back. Did it start with yellow ones for cancer? I can't remember. Then every cause - including some specific forms of cancer - each got their own colour bracelets, and some colours were even used several times. To keep up, you'd require your entire lower arm covered in coloured bracelets, and oh horror, you might accidentally leave one out! Everyone will think you're an uncaring unsensitive bitch/bastard! (I didn't actually see that happen in my environment but it must have somewhere, it was most definitely going that way...)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:20 pm (UTC)Re the bracelets... before the first bracelet there was a similar thing, which was poppies. I don't know if that happens outside .uk? In case not - poppies are worn in early November as a mark of remembrance for war dead. I'm not sure when it started, but it's been around for considerably longer than my lifetime. Not wearing one, in some contexts, is a big faux pas. No newsreader or politician could be without one, and in some businesses the same applies. Then inflation started to set in, and some politicians started escalating the *size* of their poppies, until some were almost comically large. And then we got all the bracelets. And the ribbons. And the white poppies, come to think of it. And yes, it starts to devalue them all.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-13 02:00 am (UTC)*growl*
*HUGS!*
:-)