Nobility and other VIPs in the past employed tasters to ensure their food wasn’t poisoned. Claudius famously hired a dud and died for his poor choice of employee. More recently, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have made use of food tasters. Despite these contemporary examples, I think it’s probably safe to say it’s a dying profession.
However, as I read Carolyn Kitchener’s article in The Atlantic on the rise of the alt-right on Reddit, I wondered if consumers needed a new kind of taster: someone who can test whether what we are reading comes from a dubious source and may poison our perspectives if we do not thoroughly examine the provenance and motives that lie behind what we are consuming. The legislation and codes of conduct that governed the Fourth Estate once gave us some comfort that what we read was fit for human consumption but those structures do not apply on the internet.
Mindfulness in body and spirit is very topical. But we should also be mindful of our sources of memes, and our own role in legitimising the toxicity feeding the algorithms.
From Ms Kitchenet’s piece:
"Whitney Phillips, a professor of literary studies at Mercer University, has been researching the culture of online trolls—people who post intentionally provocative or offensive material on the internet—for 10 years. For most of her career, she had to convince her colleagues that the members of fringe communities on websites like 4Chan and Reddit, who traffic in racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes, were worth studying. “They’d say, who cares? They’re just jerks on the internet.” But over the last 18 months, what was once the fringe has penetrated the mainstream.
According to a study published last week, these fringe communities have a disproportionate impact on more mainstream media platforms like Twitter, influencing the larger public conversation."