Did you see what the fast food chain Tweeted today?

BUSINESSES AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Okay, it's time for me to sound like a grumpy old man, because there aren't many good things to say about this one. We're living in an age in which advertisement is so saturated in our everyday lives that we often don't even notice its presence any longer. While streaming services like Netflix impose midroll and preroll ads on video content that people are already paying to see, so too do we see this oversaturation in places that don't look like traditional TV commercials. One such place is on social media.
I deleted my Twitter account near the start of this year. It was one of the better decisions I've made. While I sometimes miss the ability to follow certain actors and artists' works as closely as I could on the site, it was obvious that most of the time I spent on the site was unpleasant, rather than fun, and deleting my entire account was the only way to permanently keep me off of it. Now, the only social media website I use in any capacity is Tumblr, and even then I use it in-browser with an ad-blocker on–which is something that never would have worked for Twitter, since Twitter's ads are sponsored posts, and cannot be filtered from the actual content. It's in this function that the biggest problem with advertising on social media is visible.
The line between what is an ad and what is a post that happens to talk about a product that someone thinks you should buy is becoming blurier by the second. It's damn near impossible to trust anyone's opinion online when it comes to buyable products, because influencers can be quite lackadaisical with regulations demanding that they disclose paid promotions. Businesses find this blurring to be helpful, and it certainly is for their bottom lines; when advertisements look the same as friends' posts, consumers believe that businesses are their friends. That Twitter account isn't trying to sink its claws into my brain to make me spend money, no! It's my good friend Wendy's, who always posts the funniest things! No one is completely immune to this kind of personality-driven advertising, and it's so pervasive that it's hardly even viewed as sleazy or suspicious anymore. Combine this advertising method with the inherent predation that social media–especially heavily algorithmic social media, like Tik Tok–encourages, and you have a perfect storm for a miserable online experience that many people will have trouble identifying the reason for.

As we near the more real-world adjacent aspects of this course's final third, I have a lot more trouble stomping by with my head down. For an English class, this has turned into something so obsessed with business that I have to kick and scream every moment that I do anything for it. The side of me that hates corporations, hates capitalism, hates advertising… it absolutely froths at the mouth when it's being asked to suggest improvements for businesses that want to make money. What, you ask, is my suggestion for what businesses can do to improve their use of social media? Don't use it.
I cannot in good faith condone the kind of advertising that goes on in spaces that were originally designed with human expression and joy in mind. For a long time, the internet was a world that was free from the billboard-plastered space of common day, but now it's the same as any old subway, with every surface aggressively used to further profit and attention from people who are tired and miserable. Businesses are not my friend; they are no one's friend but their own. I will not have them pretend otherwise.
The day that corporations stop flashing their teeth at me on every other post may well be the day that I return to Twitter. Though, hopefully by that point I will have found more fulfilling uses of my time and attention than social media. I've been out of touch since the day I was born, so I don't feel like it's unprecedented for me to say this: the current state of social media is not healthy, fun, or moral. It's draining and negative and profit-driven to the point that I wish desperately that it wasn't so useful. As of right now, though, the cons outweigh the pros, and as long as corporations rule the airwaves, that will be the case.
 

Yikes

 IS ONE'S IDENTITY A 'PARADOX OF CHOICE?'
Well, hey, I was in a decent enough mood today until I watched that Barry Schwartz TED Talk. I've never been fond of TED Talks; I think they're usually reductive and condescending, and I made it a point not to watch any of the suggested ones for this course unless absolutely necessary. This week, I thought, 'hey, I could give one of these a shot!' The title and summary of Schwartz's Talk made it seem like it was going to be about decision paralysis, and that's certainly something I experience a lot, as someone that suffers from ADHD.
I didn't watch the whole thing, because I got about five minutes in and the guy put up a transphobic comic panel so that he could sneer about how 'personal identity' is a choice, now. Thanks for that, teach. Good to know you vet your content for potentially hateful views.
So, now I'm sitting with the unpleasant reminder that most people think that gender and sexuality is a choice–a choice that they find disgusting and ridiculous. So, instead of talking about a decision that I have made in life, like my career path or my education level or where I live, I'm gonna go ahead and talk about a decision that isn't anyone's to make: gender.

WHEN DO YOU DECIDE WHO YOU ARE?
No one can really answer this question. Life is a constant series of discoveries about oneself, and while a lot of the 'finding out' happens around one's 20th decade, it never really stops. And it's not a decision, for the most part. The decisions we make are about what parts of ourselves we want to emphasize, to prioritize, to discard, to hide. The decision of a transgender person is not which gender they are. It isn't a cisgender person's decision which gender they are, either; that's decided for them by the doctor that delivers them as a baby. The only difference is that at some point in the life of a transgender person, they realize that that doctor made the wrong decision.
So, what is a choice that a transgender person has? They can, to some extent, choose how the world perceives them. They can choose to transition, whether that involves changing their name or undergoing hormone replacement therapy or any number of other things. Though, the way that they're perceived is still going to be somewhat at the whims of other people. Or, if a transgender person decides, they could not transition, which doesn't involve changing their gender back, but rather suppressing their actual gender so as to avoid endangering themselves.
One has to weigh the options heavily for this kind of choice. Transition might help mental health, might improve confidence and reduce dysphoria and make life generally easier, but it might also make someone more visible, more at risk of violence and discrimination. For many transgender people, the choice is how they die: suicide or murder?
So, no, being transgender is not a decision. At least, it's not one made by the trans person. Instead, it's a choice made by the people around them. Society at large constantly defines and redefines what it looks like to be a man and a woman, and individuals reinforce those definitions by picking clothes for their children or, you know, murdering transgender people. I will not beat around the bush on that whole murder thing, either. I will not make light of queerness the way that Barry Schawrtz does.
Truly, I want you to think about the idea of transness being a decision. If a decision like that were to be available in your life, a decision that could make your life infinitely harder, more expensive, more dangerous. A decision that could alienate your friends and family, that could get your children taken away from you, that could prevent you from holding down a job or a home because it is still legal in most states right now to deny queer people housing or adoption rights or employment with basically no consequences. If that were a choice, why would anyone make it?

Maybe, just maybe, the consequences of not transitioning are so grave that it isn't really a choice at all.