Tag Archives: social media

Confessions of a Toxic Tech Company

Image of Twitter and Elon Musk's account with the new X logo
image via CNN

You’ve probably heard the news about Twitter—I’m sorry, the recently rebranded ‘X’—and everything Elon Musk is doing with the social media giant to, it seems, drive the company right into the ground. (For fun? For profit? In a fit of megalomaniacal spite? Who knows, but as someone without a Twitter account and zero stake in the game, it sure is fun to watch.)

Which got me thinking about the movie The Social Network and the toxic histories (to match the largely toxic climates) of so many social media companies.

On the one hand, it’s horrifying, considering how much of our information these companies have and the control they can exert on our lived reality (see: fake news, as just one example). On the other hand, it’s definitely entertaining to dive deep into the dramas surrounding all these companies.

In the spirit of that, here are some stories of toxic tech companies, the wild egos behind them, and what affect they have on our society, our minds, and our future.

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Reading Trends: Looking Back to Look Ahead

The start of a new year always brings about a time of reflection and optimism. It is usually when people set reading goals but with the stress of the past couple of years, it is no surprise that more and more people are advocating to not set goals at all but rather to enjoy books without guilt. My agreement with this trending regarding our mindset around reading led me to wonder: what other reading trends will we see this year? I took a look at some of last year’s trends to help me answer this curiosity!

One thing that is clear is that social media will continue to affect book sales, or at least book interest. In Scribd’s Year in Review for 2021, they noted that books that were popular on #BookTok (a.k.a TikTok videos about books) were also popular on their platform. This is no surprise to me, as someone who has screamed about books on various social media platforms for years, but I think it is still fascinating to see. I do not think the popularity of BookTok will disappear any time soon, but I hope to see a variety of books getting more popular this year. While I love romance and am excited to see its popularity online, I am hoping that more underrated authors will get their limelight soon as the books that are popular are written by New York Times best-selling authors and while those books are great, I always love to see new authors being discovered. Some of my favourite reads that are also BookTok favourites include The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.

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We Need to Talk About BookTok

the song of achilles

Earlier this year I wrote about the hype machine and its influence on the book industry (and on our own subsequent reactions to the hyped books). In that post, I talked about how Instagram (“Bookstagram”), YouTube (“BookTube”), and Goodreads all contribute to the success of certain books. But, in my ignorance of the app, I neglected to pay tribute to the actual behemoth in the hype game: TikTok.  

Confession: as an organization comprised mainly of adults, staff at the library are not as TikTok-literate as some of our younger patrons. A lot of us were scratching our heads as to why, for example, The Song of Achillesa book published in 2011—currently has a combined total of 115 holds (and our neighbour to the south, the Toronto Public Library, boasts a total of 1911 holds). I mean, it’s a great book, but why the sudden burst in popularity? The story behind this is the same for titles like We Were Liars (2014), They Both Die at the End (2017), and One of Us is Lying (2017), which all have disproportionately long waitlists for how long they’ve been out. And the story is, to put it simply, that someone cried about them on TikTok.  

Influence on book popularity often comes from outside the literary world. At the library, we know that if a book is adapted into a film or television show, the hold list will jump astronomically (if anyone is still interested in reading the first book of the Bridgerton series, it looks like it’s finally available). Same thing happens when a celebrity endorses a book, or if an author goes on TV to talk about their work (this is particularly true for health-related topics like dieting and aging). So it’s not surprising that social media would be a similar force. But where Instagram users pitch books via artfully arranged, hyper-controlled, aesthetically conscious images, and where YouTube creators talk about books for anywhere from 5-30 minutes, TikTokers create short, quick videos pivoting almost entirely on emotional reactions: “books that will make you sob” is a popular topic, and often features people wailing dramatically into the camera. In an interview with the New York Times on the topic, the director of books at Barnes & Noble shared the following tidbit: “These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it across the room, and it becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately connect with.” 

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