Media is: Energy Drink Discord Bros, Tinder Fish Guys, and NPC TikTok Girlies
You might notice something a little different about us in our editorial pic this week, and that’s because Maia and Fran have left the chat. Enter Frank, Mark, and their shared gf Alexa. Frank is a Discord bro sponsored by Monster who posts slightly concerning conspiracy rants on YouTube, Mark is your classic Tinder fish bogan who you should block at first message before he asks you out on a picnic-turned-hunting date, and Alexa, named after Amazon’s home assistant, is a TikTok girlie who makes crazy bank pretending to be an NPC on live.
Welcome to the ‘Influence and Media’ issue: our chance to dissect this hyper-connected and weird AF media world. As two Gen Z babies, we’ve grown up with the internet. We’ve witnessed multiple eras of social media: Facebook, created to be a university student hub, becoming a Boomer-heavy meme and rant space; funny videos on Vine about dropping croissants transformed into lip syncs on Musical.ly; and then finally, the intensely personalised and somewhat political hub that is TikTok. Within the last 20 years, the core way we exchange information and connection has changed drastically. We’ve gone rom newspapers to scrolling through #MeToo storytimes paired with Subway Surfers visuals on TikTok, or infographic slides on Instagram news pages. The way media operates is not as straightforward anymore, and we tell our stories through many different platforms.
As future journalist children we loved magazines like Creme and Total Girl (and their free gifts). Instead of VuW Meaningful Confessions, we got our hot tea from ‘Dolly Doctor’. Even then, we doubt the celebrity gossip we read in those pages was totally truthful.
The pipeline from commenter to influencer to media personality is stronger than ever before. Within the like-driven social media sphere, the individual audience member becomes a ‘citizen journalist’ with a very important role in the way information is shared and digested. A writer or documentary maker could spend hours researching and forming a story for an un-fact-checked hate comment to be what makes it go viral for unintended reasons.
The relationship between news media and social media is a two way street. We’re no stranger to following a news lead from a TikTok or Confessions post, but we don’t go as far as places like the Daily Mail, who literally write their sensationalist headlines straight from the latest viral influencer (with or without their permission). An interview clip from fringe student media can catch a politician out and sit front and centre in a story, like Scott Sheeran chatting unmoderated shit about fees free on the Salient Unedited Sessions, leaving Nicola Willis scrambling to clean it up. A simple picture can be blown up in the blink of an eye, with the response becoming the news story. For example, the mugshot of one former US President, which was quickly yassified and parodied by thousands (and he even jumped on the gag to make a $7 billion profit selling t-shirts).
Lately, we’ve been thinking about how we shouldn’t trust everything we see online, and it’s curious to realise that we’ve always been caught in the divide between fact and fiction. Traditional media is tasked with prioritising their truth (even if Daily Mail lets the rest down). Social media might be the core way we get our information, but we hope our print mag still has a place, if only to log off and run your hands through some ink and (hopefully) true stories.
This issue hard launches Salient’s food influencer era, with reviews of all the food at campus and the new Willis Lane complex. We’re chatting media with unwittingly famous media personality Paddy Gower, who started his journo career right here at Salient, writing for us back in 1998. We’d be remiss to not continue our extensive Barbie coverage, with responses to the highly-anticipated movie.
Tory discusses how scary the internet’s extensive and unnecessary tracking is, warning readers to turn off their Snap Maps. Tom tracks the downfall of Tumblr and the old-age of unfiltered social media back to the Fyre Festival of 2013, DashCon. Phoebe asks how we can create boundaries around the constant access anyone has to us via social media.
In the #BREAKINGNEWS section, there’s been an outbreak of scabies at Capital Hall (watch out breathers). The preachers bombarding students on campus tell all (by ignoring our emails). We see where the political parties stand on fair pay agreements. Finally, our Election 2023 coverage continues with ‘Candidate Kōrerō’, as we chat to Green Party candidate for Rongotai, Julie-Anne Genter.
Signing off for the week,
Fran and Maia xoxo