Selecting which parody to do, I decided to go with healthcare. In our group, we chose healthcare as our topic and divided left-leaning, center-leaning, and right-leaning articles among the group. This is a topical issue, especially in today's political climate, and honestly any parody of healthcare would hit pretty close to home. Below is a meme I created that highlights a very common argument made by the right about healthcare. This tactic is used against those who are for universal healthcare as a way to look down on them for calling it "free" when it's actually paid for by tax payer money. Most, if not all, people who are for Medicare For All (M4A) know this, and this tactic is used to drown them out. Using simple arguments like these for a complicated issue can lead outsiders who are maybe unsure or unfamiliar with M4A agree and not look deeper into it. Often people don't spend a lot of time researching, or if they do, they lean more towards one side and ignore anything that disagrees with them. It can be helpful to engage different ideas, but there are moments when the person is not genuine and is only trying to get a rise out of you. A really strong point of parody is using what people don't know against them. In a sense, the opposing side almost has to know more about the subject than they do, and use it as a way to belittle them or make them feel inferior. These cheap tactics ignore the bigger issue, and by focusing on quick comebacks that most people wouldn't have a reply to, it keeps the issue under wraps. You also don't have to be an expert on the subject to make your opposer sound "dumb" - the quicker the comebacks or the faster you tell them, the more people are willing to listen to you (a la Ben Shapiro). I'm fascinated with this trend online, especially with trolls, who lift up the loudest, crudest, and often least educated person to be their spokesperson. Most of the language in this blog post below is very biased - as biased as the article we used for this project was - particularly against the poor. Imagine this: You're in the best country in the world. You can buy anything, be anything, do anything - as long as you work hard for it. In the free market, capitalism reigns and you can climb your way to the top in the land of opportunity for everyone! Maintaining this sense of "us vs. them" is key in almost every argument, especially when trying to get more and more people to "join" your side. This tempers with freedom of thought in a way that stunts people's desire to learn. I know this post was probably a little extreme or silly, but whether they were genuine posts or trolls meant to gain traffic, it was a culmination of things I've seen online myself.
0 Comments
|
aboutWSU English Literature major and Marketing minor. Archives
May 2020
Categories |