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How to Have Crucial Conversations in the Workplace

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How to Have Crucial Conversations in the Workplace

As a young millennial about to enter the workforce, I have studied civility and tried to find ways to have better conversations both personally and professionally, especially when the stakes are high. In reading books such as Crucial Conversations, Where’s the Gift, and Radical Candor, I have come up with several key ways that you … Read more

Cancel Culture

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cancel culture

Cancel Culture. A term that most of us are quite familiar with. It first started as a movement to hold people accountable, make change, and educate others but has now evolved into ostracizing people on social media for things that range from questionable opinions to hateful rhetoric. While cancel culture has caused a great deal of controversy , the impact this phenomenon has had on the generation is not as often discussed. When it emerged, cancel culture was focused and directed towards public figures and celebrities. However, it has begun to emerge within social circles, which has transformed the way we think, talk, and express ourselves on social media sites. We have also learned to be careful and concise with the way we voice our thoughts and questions. In our younger years, our parents would tell us not to talk to strangers on the internet, instead we did the opposite and formed communities on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and more recently Tiktok. These communities comprise thousands of teenagers talking about their interests and lives with one another. This big melting pot of different cultures, beliefs, and perspectives in one space might’ve been great for exposure and diversity, but instead it became a space where those that are different from the masses are shunned. One staple of these communities is cancelling people. If you’re on social media, the chances that you’ve seen someone being cancelled, been involved in cancelling someone, or have been cancelled yourself are extremely high. In spaces like stan Twitter and Tiktok, people are cancelled for things as miniscule as liking a particular fictional character or watching a “problematic” film. As a result, we’ve become hyper-aware of everything we say or have said and we analyze how they could be interpreted or misinterpreted and used against us. We aim to educate others but if a person is found to be uneducated, they must be publicly shamed. If someone says something that is deemed to be “problematic” and after being called out for it, sees error in their actions and apologizes, we disregard their apologies, often marking them as insincere as we’ve been conditioned to allow no room for redemption. The impact this has had on our ability as a generation to feel compassion is astounding. The understanding that people have room to learn and grow has all but disappeared and intolerance has taken its place. For those that are cancelled, a big part of their social life is snatched away and they are shunned off of the platforms that they originally got to have fun during their free time, by those that they called their friends. They’re an example of what happens when you don’t fall in line with the status quo and the reason why the majority of us do. This fear has limited our ability to engage in productive discourse and has caused a mob mentality to manifest in our mindsets. So whenever we post or tweet anything, we’re constantly (albeit subconsciously) asking ourselves whether the thing we said was “unproblematic” and as we’re scrolling through our feeds, we’re scrutinizing whether others are in line with what we deem as unproblematic as well. In a much broader sense, cancel culture has normalized polarization. We’ve become used to the idea that there is only one objectively correct opinion and forget that with the amount of different cultures that are present in online discourse, there are often multiple perspectives to consider. While our proximity to a wide array of cultures and perspectives has given us this sense of awareness, it has also made us lose touch of the reality that these cultures exist outside of our screen and we forget that our experiences are not universal. Cancel culture has made us hostile towards those that remind us of it.

Zero Hour’s youth advocates urge policy makers to act before time is up

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youth advocates

After three devastating hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) flooded homes and destroyed roads in countries around the Caribbean Sea in the summer of 2017, 14-year-old Jamie Margolin knew she had to take action As a resident of Seattle, Margolin was thousands of miles away from the storms, physically speaking, but she knew that humanity was only generations away from this type of weather becoming just as common as a cloudy day. Margolin then wrote and published an essay that argued for an end to the status quo of inaction in Teen Ink’s monthly magazine. The article attracted the attention of a few similarly-minded teens who, along with others that Margolin met at a Princeton University summer program, joined together to create Zero Hour.

Reflecting on My Virtual Experience at ICON 2020

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Reflecting on My Virtual Experience at ICON 2020

Screenshot of Virtual Conference Lobby, via Destiny Hinton But, just like everything else in 2020, we quickly found a way to cope and adjust to the new normal: A Virtual PRSSA International Conference. I’m not going to lie; I was a bit skeptical about getting the full experience from a virtual conference. Having attended the … Read more

GameStop’s Sudden Surge in Stock Prices

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gamestop stocks

In an increasingly online world, the role of GameStop was steadily diminishing. People do not feel the need to visit physical stores to purchase video games, instead utilizing online platforms to buy them. Furthermore, with the on-going pandemic, people have avoided going out as much as they once did. However, with the intervention of a thread on a prolific social media platform called Reddit, the tables seem to have turned more rapidly for GameStop than any could have imagined. A subreddit, r/wallStreetBets, was what changed matters for GameStop. Perusers of this subreddit often attempted to beat out short-sellers by attempting to predict which stocks the short-sellers were after, since they did not like how short-sellers exploited the market and financial system to make profit. Short-sellers are investors who essentially pay to borrow stock for a predetermined period and sell it back to the companies later hoping to make a margin profit. Although, if the price of the stock increases when it is time to sell back the stock, short-sellers lose money. Similarly, there are hedge funds, which are groups of wealthy investors that use risky tactics, such as investing with borrowed money. Short-sellers and hedge funds benefit from the value of the asset falling, rather than rising, meaning that they try to look for companies that are declining to make a profit. In less words, these people make a gamble on whether a company’s stocks will crash or not.