I Challenge the Social Hierarchy By Writing About Ordinary People
This article can also be viewed at https://medium.com/@non-monetized_together/i-challenge-the-social-hierarchy-by-writing-about-ordinary-people-3cefb178f5e4.
Image by AndreasAux/Pixabay
A depressed man struggling to find a job. A Redditor eager to learn how to be supportive to their gay coworker. A group of music enthusiasts fighting over racial issues. These are all-too-familiar experiences for many people, but the mainstream media won’t publish any stories about them because the people involved aren’t important (by the media’s standards).
These barriers don’t exist on Nonmonetized Together. By writing stories about ordinary people I see on the Internet, I challenge social hierarchies and show people that these stories can be just as important as the issues that involve major politicians, tech CEOs, and movie stars.
The divide between public visibility and invisibility is consistently prevalent in our society. In sociology, for example, a perspective has to come from an academic to be taken seriously. Furthermore, Wikipedia has guidelines against including information from “non-notable” people.
And what about the mainstream media? Journalists need to report stories that impact ordinary people. How can this be achieved without giving people a voice? What the mainstream media will almost always do is to describe ordinary people as an intangible crowd. This could mean making reference to trending hashtags, or featuring statements from activist organizations, or anything else that paints ordinary people’s experiences as belonging to a collective.
But you may be thinking, I’ve seen completely unknown people get interviewed on the news. And I would say, yes, but the examples you’re thinking of probably fall into one of two categories. Ordinary people sometimes get interviewed when they represent a large collective group (like the transgender community, for instance) or when they play a small role in a big news story.
My point is, there aren’t enough articles where ordinary people represent nobody but themselves. They aren’t the stars of their own story. This is restricted to celebrities like Tom Brady or Selena Gomez. I’m not only basing this off my own experiences, but off of the surprised reactions I get from other people online when I write an article about people who usually don’t get heard. This reveals that the media’s ivory tower is so high up that its workers can’t even make out individual faces from a crowd. How can we expect them to make out a narrative?
And this is how Nonmonetized Together is different than the mainstream media. In the past, I have been guilty of using the term “the masses” to refer to ordinary people. I will no longer do that. Nonmonetized Together is a tool that publicly invisible could use to empower their voices, so I will treat them as individuals, not crowds.
This is not only a goal of Nonmonetized Together, but also one of the purposes that Medium was built on. While giving a platform to the unknown is a step in the right direction, there’s still more that can be done. Most Medium bloggers still don’t write stories about ordinary people unless that ordinary person is themselves or a member of their family.
There’s so much value in taking something you’ve seen from an online rando and bringing it into a different context, or adding further information, or showing what you have learned from it. Writers do this all the time with the rich and powerful. If we want society to give low-status people the strength and agency they deserve, writers must write stories about these people too, and explain why they matter.
My drive to ignore social status is rooted in my Catholic upbringing. If there is one Catholic value that made an impact on me, it’s that, and I don’t think it’s ever going to go away. The concept of treating people differently based off their social status creates a very instinctual feeling of disgust inside of me. It feels like I’m treating someone as if they were a different species.