Media
Vaccine selfies are the new social media trend, but also a reminder of unequal access – Nelson Star
In the old influencer economy, sun-kissed vacation pictures and glossy group shots were among the most valuable forms of social media currency. Now, these pandemic-flouting posts would be cause for public derision.
But a new type of photo has taken their place to induce FOMO — fear of missing out — across the online sphere: the vaccine selfie.
Photos of Canadians smiling beneath their masks as they roll up their sleeves to show off their bandages are increasingly cropping up on social media feeds as the country’s immunization campaign expands to new segments of the population.
Experts say these selfies can encourage others to overcome their vaccine hesitancy, but may also incite jealousy among those who aren’t eligible to book their appointments.
Ara Yeremian, a realtor in Vaughan, Ont., shared his vaccine selfie across social media platforms after receiving his first dose in January as the caregiver to his 91-year-old parents who live in a long-term care home.
“I wanted everybody to know that I was doing well and it’s safe to take,” said Yeremian. “Being able to be part of the solution makes me really happy.”
Ryan Quintal, a registered practical nurse in London, Ont., said he felt it was his “duty” as a health-care professional to post his selfie as a way of showing his online followers that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
The 34-year-old said the photo even prompted some friends to reach out and ask questions about getting vaccinated.
“The photo kind of represented that your turn could be coming up next,” said Quintal. “There is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
While Yeremian and Quintal say the reactions to their vaccine selfies were overwhelmingly positive, other social media users have prodding questions from commenters about how they qualified for their vaccines.
Dr. Karim Ali, director of infectious diseases for Niagara Health in Ontario, said post-injection selfies run the risk of fomenting a digital divide between the “have nots” and “have lots” of Canada’s piecemeal vaccine rollout.
Ali felt this frustration in January as he saw Toronto health-care administrators posting about getting vaccinated, while his front-line colleagues fighting an outbreak in Niagara had yet to receive their first shipment of doses.
“Vaccine envy was a real thing,” he said. “You can’t help but feel dejected. You can’t help feeling that you are left out.”
READ MORE: Canada’s total COVID-19 case count surpasses one million
Ali doesn’t judge people who want to celebrate their injections with their online followers, and believes influencers have a role to play in spreading the word about vaccine safety.
But stoking social media envy isn’t an effective public health strategy, he said, particularly when most Canadians are still patiently waiting their turn to be vaccinated.
“Think twice before you post anything,” said Ali. “There are so many people who are suffering and will continue to suffer until we get out of this.”
Krishana Sankar, science communication lead for the online platform COVID-19 Resources Canada, said vaccine selfies can be a powerful tool to combat online misinformation spreading unfounded fears about the COVID-19 vaccine.
Personal testimonials such as selfies can carry more weight than the word of health authorities, said Sankar, particularly for members of marginalized communities who may have trouble trusting the institutions that have oppressed them.
“People tend to trust people they know,” she said. “A lot of the conversations around hesitancy actually starts within that bubble of family and friends talking about their concerns about it.”
“If one person gets the vaccine, and several other people are seeing that, it causes a trickle effect.”
Sankar also cautioned social media users against prodding selfie sharers about how they qualified for their vaccinations.
While she understands that people are curious about how to secure their own place in line, Sankar said it’s wrong to question someone’s eligibility based on assumptions about their lifestyle and medical history.
Many people who may appear young and healthy could be suffering from autoimmune conditions that put them at high risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes, she noted.
“A lot of people are very quick to judge and criticize others without actually having any idea of the backstory of what’s actually going on,” she said.
“A little bit of kindness can take us a far longer way.”
Adina Bresge, The Canadian Press
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Want to support local journalism during the pandemic? Make a donation here.
Media
Social media use increases weight-related bullying risk, study says – Global News
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Social media use increases weight-related bullying risk, study says Global News
Source link
Media
Georgia’s parliament votes to approve so-called ‘Russian law’ targeting media in first reading – CityNews Kitchener
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Georgia’s parliament has voted in the first reading to approve a proposed law that would require media and non-commercial organizations to register as being under foreign influence if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad.
Opponents say the proposal would obstruct Georgia’s long-sought prospects of joining the European Union. They denounce it as “the Russian law” because Moscow uses similar legislation to stigmatize independent news media and organizations seen as being at odds with the Kremlin.
“If it is adopted, it will bring Georgia in line with Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus and those countries where human rights are trampled. It will destroy Georgia’s European path,” said Giorgi Rukhadze, founder of the Georgian Strategic Analysis Center.
Although Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili would veto the law if it is passed by parliament in the third reading, the ruling party can override the veto by collecting 76 votes. Then the parliament speaker can sign it into law.
The bill is nearly identical to a proposal that the governing party was pressured to withdraw last year after large street protests. Police in the capital, Tbilisi, used tear gas Tuesday to break up a large demonstration outside the parliament.
The only change in wording from the previous draft law says non-commercial organizations and news media that receive 20% or more of their funding from overseas would have to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The previous draft law said “agents of foreign influence.”
Zaza Bibilashvili with the civil society group Chavchavadze Center called the vote on the law an “existential choice.”
He suggested it would create an Iron Curtain between Georgia and the EU, calling it a way to keep Georgia “in the Russian sphere of influence and away from Europe.”
The Associated Press
Media
Henry Winter’s surprise exit a sign of the fracturing evolution of the football media
|
For more than three decades, English football media was a Winter wonderland. An eternal Winter. Winter extending an icy grip over the landscape. But even Winter, it seems, can end up being frozen out. Given the cold shoulder. It’s time to wrap up for Winter, now this particular Winter’s tale has reached its final chapter.
That, with apologies, was the opening paragraph to a column about Henry Winter’s dismissal by the Times, written in the style of Henry Winter for the Times. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible you haven’t the faintest idea what, or who, I’m talking about. Which to an oblique and probably self-defeating extent is actually the point.
Winter is the chief football writer of the Times, at least until he was suddenly made redundant last week. It was the dismissal heard around the world, if by “the world” you mean “the WhatsApp groups of newspaper sports journalists”. And in a low-key, navel-gazing sort of way, a move that actually tells us quite a lot about how, and through whom, we consume football these days.
Because over his 35 years at the Independent, the Telegraph and the Times, Winter probably became the closest thing football journalism has ever had to a celebrity. Players know him. Managers know him. He was ubiquitous, respected, pretty much untouchable. When the Times hired him they announced the signing with a lavish television advertising campaign. And though he rarely set out to ruffle feathers, when he pursued a cause – the Hillsborough survivors’ fight for justice, or his distaste at the cross on the recent England kit – his voice invariably lent that cause extra weight.
Winter and I were colleagues at the Telegraph for seven years, but our interactions were brief. Invariably he was out on the road: notching up hundreds of games a season, thousands of miles, match reports by the kilo, interviews by the ream, pre-season tours, under-21 tournaments, Friday night Championship games: every waking second of every waking day funnelled into this existence, a career that became a life, and vice versa.
On the writing side you might even describe him as a kind of personal inspiration: a reminder of the timeless virtues of simple, elegant prose. Extremely short sentences. Like these. No unnecessary adjectives, no undue nuance, no pun too excruciating. Barcelona v Chelsea is “the Catalans among the London pigeons”. Birmingham 0-7 Liverpool is “seven-up for Liverpool, grapes of wrath for Steve Bruce”. Mario Götze’s winning goal in the 2014 World Cup final becomes “Mario de Janeiro.” The fans are invariably “wonderful” or “magnificent”.
And what was this existence? Perhaps from a non-industry perspective, the most macabrely fascinating aspect of Winter’s career is the way it represents one of the media’s last concerted attempts to embody what you might term “the authentic voice of football”: authoritative, omniscient, unaffiliated, gospel. Ultra on the streets, Shakespeare on the sheets. And by extension the idea that this sport is a common space, a singular space. That when we watch football we are all essentially watching the same thing, together.
This is, in case you hadn’t noticed, an idea that has been in recession for quite some time, a process that largely mirrors the evolution of the football media as a whole. But for decades it was the way we all received the game: through the giants of television and radio, the doyens of Fleet Street, camel-coated men who offered not so much opinion but judgement. When Alan Hansen said something on Match of the Day, or Brian Woolnough opined in the Sun, it became truth by the very dint of being uttered, by the sheer absence of alternative or dissenting voices.
More latterly that role was assumed by Twitter, a website where – as a friend once memorably described it – journalists could pretend they were celebrities and celebrities could pretend they were journalists. Naturally Winter, with his million-plus followers, was at the vanguard of the migration, holding court in the digital town square, still road-testing those puns, still toasting those magnificent fans.
But, under the surface, the terrain has been fracturing for years: attention and influence draining away not just from traditional newspapers, but from everybody. Even television has lost its power to unite us: its live action now mostly paywalled, its pundits now invariably partisan, its content disposable. What once constituted our shared football space has splintered into a million galaxies: forums and fan media, podcasts and YouTube channels, blogs and specialist websites, Reddit and TikTok, the curated feeds that allow us to view a game through whatever filter we choose: tribal, social, banter, fantasy team.
The old world – a drowned world of traditional gatekeepers and newspaper dukes and lukewarm Gareth Southgate quotes embargoed until 10.30pm Friday – is gone. And perhaps the last people yet to notice are the dwindling few still inside it.
What might an “authentic voice of football” sound like in 2024? What kind of journalist could meaningfully speak to all the sport’s various silos? They would need to be an expert in men’s and women’s football, the game’s social and historical context, geopolitics and finance, transfers and tactics, analytics and sports science, banter and rage, all the major European leagues and quite a few others besides. And, of course, they would be conversant in all the dizzying new languages of visual media, across all conceivable formats and platforms. That person, in case you’re wondering, doesn’t actually exist. It’s all football. But increasingly, it’s too big for any one entity to conceive, let alone cover.
And for the avoidance of doubt, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. For all its inequities and inefficiencies, the landscape of football media is broader and richer place than it has ever been. You have Fabrizio Romano for transfers, Grace Robertson for tactics, Versus for football culture, Stadio podcast for the global game, Mark Goldbridge for performative rants about Erik ten Hag, the Guardian for chin-strokey think-pieces written by the guys picked last at PE. In a way, there has never been a better time to consume football. The garden is blooming. But for spring to begin – and yes, you know it’s coming – first winter has to end.
-
Sports19 hours ago
Team Canada’s Olympics looks designed by Lululemon
-
Business18 hours ago
Firefighters battle wildfire near Edson, Alta., after natural gas line rupture – CBC.ca
-
News20 hours ago
Richard Chevolleau Short Film “Marvelous Marvin” Set to go to Camera
-
Tech11 hours ago
iPhone 15 Pro Desperado Mafia model launched at over ₹6.5 lakh- All details about this luxury iPhone from Caviar – HT Tech
-
Investment21 hours ago
Stephen Poloz will lead push to boost domestic investment by Canadian pension funds
-
News21 hours ago
Federal budget 2024: Some of the winners and losers
-
Sports11 hours ago
Lululemon unveils Canada's official Olympic kit for the Paris games – National Post
-
News23 hours ago
Murdoch Partner Helps Asia’s Richest Man Build a Media Empire