Thumbs up, thumbs down: The cycles of 'cancel culture' - Sydney Morning Herald

In Australia, cultural heavyweights published a statement in response to the controversy surrounding debut director Eliza Scanlen's Sydney Film Festival prize-winning Mukbang, a short film about a schoolgirl binge-eating food online as part of a trend that has been popular in South Korea for the past decade.

One of the filmmakers involved in writing the statement, who asked not to be named, described the Sydney Film Festival as a beloved institution and said a video call involving industry leaders was held as the debate about Mukbang unfolded online.

On the same day the letter was published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 153 prominent writers, activists and academics across the political spectrum, including J.K.

Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, released a letter in Harper's Magazine.

But as with the Sydney Film Festival letter, it took aim at "the swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought" and the "vogue for public shaming and ostracism".

These included discussions about the need for greater diversity in media, including at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which has been criticised for appointing five freelance cultural critics, all of whom were white (two of whom resigned in protest over the lack of cultural diversity among the five critics).

Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad, founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and author of The Lebs, said the letters and statements were a "distraction which derail our attempts to hold white people and white institutions, including the institution that published the letter, accountable for their role in systemic and structural racism".

While those arts leaders who signed the Sydney Film Festival letter said they didn't intend to fan the flames of "cancel culture", they were prepared for criticism.

"The label 'cancel culture' turns attention to these discussions and debates but frames them as problematic, and I think that really is not particularly helpful," University of NSW Associate Professor Tanja Dreher, a media and communications academic, said.

University of Sydney cultural studies expert Dr Benjamin Nickl said contemporary "cancel culture" had developed over several years, although protests, boycotts, public shaming and erasure had a long history.

Nickl said the current strain was a media and youth culture phenomenon often related to clicktivism, social media warriors, hashtaggers and keyboard courage.

Dreher said generational difference also contributed to the nature of contemporary "cancel culture", as the conversations played out in different ways on social media and in legacy media outlets

"In some recent cases what we are seeing is commentators who have some platform – and that is derived from a long-term involvement in media and cultural institutions – in conversation with a generation of advocates and activists and practitioners who have really developed in the social media environment and are very adept at using the affordances of social media for discussion, debate and activism, and so in a sense we've got different models of how to have these discussions and debates and sometimes they are rubbing up against each other," Dreher said