One Social Media For All, All For One Social Media

I’m on Threads! The new Twitter-like platform. And I thought I’d become friends with the place’s owner by making a cartoon about him. I mean, what could go wrong, right? It’s not like he’s rapidly becoming the owner of all major social media platforms and that he can kick me off all of them or something.

I’ll have lunch at a place later. I’ll punch the owner first and then see if he still wants to serve me. Good idea, methinks.

With cartoons, they say you should “punch up,” but that’s usually in independent media outlets, not on the platform owned by the person you are “punching up” to. It’d be like writing a column critical of Rupert Murdoch and publishing it in one of his newspapers. What could go wrong, right? I wonder if that’s why we see so few cartoons about... him... (Waves in a general direction.)

People probably won’t understand the joke of this cartoon in the future: they may not know who he is, and his company’s logo might look different. That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. If you delve into archives of past editorial cartoons, you often don’t understand them anymore; they reference something happening at that moment.

People only look at a cartoon for 7 seconds on average, and a cartoon is small, so to convey an idea, the cartoon has to hint at some backstory the viewer knows. If it references a timeless fairytale, the cartoon can be timeless, too. However, if it references something in the news at that very moment, people might not understand the cartoon even a month later.

At the same time, few art forms can instantly evoke such strong emotions. Not this one, though, right, Mark? It’s just a light-hearted visual pun! Don’t kick me off your platforms, dude! Just a friendly hi!

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