BEER CANS AND CANCEL CULTURE CASE STUDY

As a child, my parents have always told me that whatever you put out on social media will stay there forever. It doesn’t matter if you end up deleting the initial post days or even hours after you posted it, it will still be there, and somebody can eventually dig up whatever you tried to hide from the public. That has always stuck with me throughout growing up, significantly growing up primarily in a digital age where everybody posts their thoughts and opinions online for the world to see. Although having the freedom to post whatever you want, whenever you want, there is always an underlying price to pay when you gain a more prominent following and a bigger platform. In the case of Carson King, he got a large following and a more prominent platform after many people saw his sign requesting beer money. That sign made King go viral and raised more than a million dollars from amused fans (Leake, Armijo & Stroud, 2019). We do have to acknowledge that King did a selfless action and donated the rest of the money he raised to the Stead Family Children’s Hospital after buying one case of beer for himself and became known as an “Iowa Legend” (Leake, Armijo & Stroud, 2019). Despite his efforts to give back to the community, his rise to fame came with backlash from his past as reporter Aaron Calvin dug up racist tweets that King had written in high school.

This article has me divided on whether King being “cancelled” was valid. I do understand that while he did tweet racist statements in high school, he was also being praised by his community and the internet as the “Iowa Legend” due to his rise to fame and his donation of the money raised from going viral. Still, the tweets from his teenage years resurfaced and changed the way everyone looked at him. I do believe that Calvin had a right to bring up these controversial tweets that King wrote, since King was turning into a public figure, but at the same time, I do not think that people should be quick to judge King’s action regarding his tweets. Yes, racism is not something that should be taken lightly, especially with recent activities (non-stop protest in America) from the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other black Americans. Still, I think that people should not be so quick to judge King from his tweets when Calvin was also exposed for having written offensive tweets in his past. It makes me wonder if King never went viral, would his tweets from the past ever be an issue? Would he ever be called out on what he said as a teenager if he never had a following? That we can never know. People can change over time. Although it is never mentioned in the article if King ever addressed or apologized for what he said in his past, we can only assume that this was a learning curve. Cancel culture is a lesson to anyone: with growing fame and acknowledgment also means taking responsibility for whatever you may have said in your past.

References

Leake, G., Armijo, A., & Stroud, A. (2019). Beer cans and cancel culture. Media Ethics Initiative. Retrieved from https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/2019/12/04/beer-cans-and-cancel-culture/

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