you end up concluding in the piece that these reactions are now so common and so predictable

that they've actually become pretty boring. Do you have any hope that chronically online discourse

may get so boring that we all eventually move on from it? I do actually. That is something that I

think is a positive thing because there are a lot of things that would have been such bigger deals

had they happened 10 years ago. When something went viral 10 years ago, it was Rebecca Black Friday.

That lasted for months. Now that would have been an afternoon. It would have been stuck to

this niche portion of TikTok or YouTube or whatever. People would have laughed at it. It would have

been over. I think the same thing can be said for these discourses. Half of these things,

and I'm online all the time, I didn't even hear about them until people dropped them in the tweet.

I think because they happen so often, they'll become just kind of irrelevant. The way that they

should be really, which is a tiny, tiny percentage of people can read something in the complete opposite

way that it's meant to be read. That becomes its own conversation. I think it'll just be increasingly

like shunted to the side where it belongs. I'm John Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey everyone, my guest this week is journalist Rebecca Jennings, who writes about social media and

internet culture for Vox. A few weeks ago, Rebecca asked Twitter for examples of the most

chronically online discourse of 2022. The replies were incredible. A woman who was accused of

elitism for tweeting about how much she enjoys drinking coffee with her husband in their garden,

another woman who was attacked as a white savior because she wanted to bring her neighbors

chilly, a debate about whether telling people to touch grass is ableist, and another debate about

whether Anne Frank had white privilege. Now, I am one of the most chronically online people I know,

and somehow I had still missed most of these examples and couldn't believe they were real.

They were fun to laugh at and send to friends, but they also made me wonder, who are these people?

...