Interview of De’Viona Lowery

By Midori Hill

Cancel Culture - Destroyer of Celebrities but How Does It Affect You?

1. Will you give a brief summary of your research question and what your answer to your research question
ended up being? That is, what did you conclude after conducting your research?

Summary of my research question basically would be what is cancel culture and how does it affect how we
interact in our interpersonal relationships in the real world. So with that being said I came to conclude that
the act of canceling is very repetitive therefor turning habitual and just like all habits, once established it is
hard to break from it and to keep it from affecting other parts of your life.

2. What inspired you to choose your research topic?

I'll say that I just spent a lot of my time on social media and I know it sounds bad but it is an integral part of
our lives now just like memes and texting along with all these new technological advancements. I love how
social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etcetera allow users to have a voice in to share
their opinions and to make a stand and start movements amongst ourselves. But out of that has come what
we can now call cancel culture which is something that I've been hearing a lot of lately issues just you know
in my face all the time and one day within my own social group a friend of ours was being canceled and it
was just crazy to me you know it just how can we cancel someone within our own lives expecting that
person to just up and disappear. That's not how those things work and it caused a lot of problems with the
group up so I wanted to kind of research how on a subconscious level this could be affecting other people.

3. How does your topic relate to what you want to do career wise? If it's related to a hobby, how does that
hobby describe you as a person?

I'm not quite sure you can call this a hobby but definitely perusing through social Justice profiles online it's
something I do all the time I'm always engaging talking to other people asking for the perspectives. And on
top of that I am always talking to people around me, my peers

4. How does your gender, age, race, cultural background, sexuality etc. influence your position on your
topic?

I'm definitely a firm believer of everything about you influences everything that you do in the decisions you
make definitely because of the experiences you have gained because of how you identify and where you
come from. With that being said I definitely do think that my age, cultural background, and familial
background had a very huge impact on my position in my topic. Age dealing with just my generation being
way more familiar with social media mores oh, the fact that I am black and black Twitter is such a huge force
on the internet, and the fact that my sisters have a different way of interacting online that I do yet they are
younger then me but even so my oldest sister interacts differently than me so when I converse with them I
get a different perspective on the exact same topics that are going on in the world but in the social media
Realm.
5. What obstacles did you face in your project?

The main obstacle I faced in doing this project and doing research on it was the fact that it hasn't been
researched before it is a very new topic I would say only a few years old and it hasn't taken a lot of notice
because it's on social media and sadly in my own personal opinion things that happen with inventions
dominated by younger generation don't get looked at as much because they are either harder to understand
or not used as much by academics of older standing therefore put on the back burner in left to manifest until
it becomes a humongous problem only then to be demonized and warped into something that is our fault
and left for us to deal with ourselves. So with that being said I had to think about the various different
concepts that made up cancel culture such as groupthink, mob mentality, unanimity, amongst other things to
base a majority of my ideas on.

6. Who was your targeted audience for this research?

I had two main groups in mind for when I did this project the first being my peers I definitely wanted to
dedicate this project to them because we're the ones who spend most of our time on these platforms doing
this process because we have a good voice online and with that being said the other group that I had in
mind for when I did this project was academics who will be in who are more qualified than me to research
something like this. The goal of this project was definitely to call attention to this potentially detrimental
problem so that it can research thoroughly.

7. How does this research link to the greater community? How does this project make UNCG stronger?

This project definitely makes UNCG stronger because social media affects almost every part of our lives
from the marketing that we see on TV to the way we get our information and how we get our voices out
there so we can feel like we've been heard. Our voices have power in with cancel culture that power can be
warped and end up becoming something that we do merely out of habit, as something that everybody else
does so therefore you can't point a finger at me type of situation. I wanted to bring awareness so that those
in our community can understand how powerful our words can be it also how not powerful they can be
especially if you end up canceling someone close to you they don't just go away so therefore you have to
use your skills to actually deal with problem. So essentially this project serves as a warning and from that
warning our community can assess where they fit personally into fixing this problem and preventing any long
lasting negative effects from it.

8. Would you say that this topic reflects a lot about who you are?
I would say that this topic definitely does because within researching all of this I was basically being handed
a mirror and I had to look at my own actions and how I interact with others and how participating in cancel
culture has affected my way of thinking. It is caused me to be more self-aware and I'm cautious about the
things that I put down and how could I am to judge.

9. If you could change how you've done your research thus far, would you? if so how?
I definitely would have started out with more peer-to-peer interviews and definitely would have engaged in
some faculty interviews most likely within the psychology department here as well. That way even though
very minoot I would have covered a figure area as to gain more awareness.
10. Was there ever a time during the process that your ideas and opinions changed in ways that you did not
expect
them to?

I definitely expected to find that cancel culture was 100% negative and how it affected Us in in a way I
believed it to be our own doing and that it was something we could change in a heartbeat. With that being
said it isn't it's just like any other habit easy to create, hard to break.

11. Why do you think people should care about what you are sharing in your research?

I think people should care about what I'm sharing because even if you do not have a social media page if
you think you don't spend a lot of time on there as well the people around you are still connected and what
they experience online they are bringing into their lives and therefore directly yours when they talk to you.

12. If you had more time to study this topic, in what ways would you add to your research?

If I had more time to study this topic I definitely would get UNCG faculty from all of the social sciences
to wait in it definitely would have been more helpful to understand what was going on and then I would
interview students sitting alongside these faculty so that they can bounce off ideas from one another to
include in my research.