{"id":140241,"date":"2021-06-16T11:28:28","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T19:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=140241"},"modified":"2021-06-16T11:28:28","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T19:28:28","slug":"the-guardian-it-is-obscene-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-pens-blistering-essay-against-social-media-sanctimony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=140241","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian: \u2018It is obscene\u2019: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2021\/jun\/16\/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-social-media-sanctimony\">The Guardian article<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/chimamanda.com\/\">From ChimaManda.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.<\/p>\n<p>I find it obscene.<\/p>\n<p>There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature \u2013 the messy stories of our humanity \u2013 but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.<\/p>\n<p>People who ask you to \u2018educate\u2019 yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by \u2018educate,\u2019 they actually mean \u2018parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Guardian article. From ChimaManda.com: In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=140241\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140242,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140241\/revisions\/140242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}