[Simplicity]

^ These are all good points. That fact is, social media is opening up dialogues conventional media simply hasn't. But I still question the effectiveness of nearly universal outrage about everything by virtue of hashtag slacktivism. Dialogue is good, but fatigue is a reality of that. Like you mentioned earlier, the aughts were a blowback of the heavily activist 90's - people simply became tired of all the manufactured outrage about everything.

I appreciate your optimism because I think it's a requirement of at least some people on this earth, I'm just a little more reticent to believe we've reached that critical mass. Take the Rinelle Harper issue. Does anybody really believe that the media paying more attention to this than they may have otherwise changes how white middle class people feel about aboriginals in this city? I'm doubtful. I think it's probably the opposite. Here you have another case of two aboriginals attacking a sixteen year old aboriginal girl in a place she very likely shouldn't have been. Their opinion of that isn't going to change. And every time some editorial appears in the paper suggesting that anybody other than the perpetrator are to blame, you're having the opposite effect. Nobody's interested in Shannon Sampert's trite pedantry on how white suburban families have created ghettos of the inner city by virtue of their structural racism and lack of urbanist sensibilities or Steve LaFleur's nonsense about intentionally putting yourself at risk on dark inner city bridges and parks as a means for creating the watchful eyes that criminals fear; they only care that one member of Poplar River First Nation attacked a member of Garden Hill First Nation and why was she on the river walk in the first place and why can't they just stay where they're from unless they can learn to operate within the social norms of society.

And this is really at the core of why I'm skeptical. People need to gradually and on their own terms become sensitized to a new reality. Grabbing a bigger hammer does not achieve the goal. Because that's what social media is: a giant hammer wielded by the most incredulous. And that will have a short shelf life. Does anybody remember Kony?

As for Jian Ghomeshi, I mean, give that a couple weeks. This is the nature of today's too-easy outrage; it's just as easy to forget. I'm not of the opinion that social media's ability to both try and convict somebody before anything has come out is such a good thing. And I'm not defending Jian Ghomeshi because I've never heard even a minute of Q in my whole life; I couldn't care less about the guy. But the machinery is dangerous. And like everything that's ever been too easy and too disregardful of nuance, it's only good until it's not. And then it's really not. Because we'll see a victim of the opposite side of this coin yet.