Chen Reading Response

1.) Who is Adrian Chen? and how does his background/areas of expertise help inform you about his perspective as it relates to this article? 

Adrian Chen is characterized as a widely known American blogger and formal staff writer at the New Yorker. Born in New York and at 39 years of age, Chen attended Wesleyan University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Chen’s expertise strength areas involve his thorough and extensive research on social media, technological trends and data, and how it affects society’s standards and how individuals interact with each other. Overall, the apprehension and preoccupation in which Chen expresses toward the media and the manipulation it can place on others makes me sympathetic of his perspective on social media and how it can oftentimes be detrimental for one’s physical and emotional health.

2.) Write a brief summary, using your words and direct quotes, of Megan Phelps-Roper’s personal transformation, as described in Chen’s piece. Be sure to include 2-3 direct quotes, framed properly. Choose quotes that help illuminate changes Phelps-Roper experienced along the way. 

Regarding to Megan Phelps-Roper’s personal transformation, in the text it states: “One day in July, 2011, Phelps-Roper was on Twitter when she came across a link to a series of photographs about a famine in Somalia. The first image was of a tiny malnourished child. She burst into tears at her desk. Her mother asked what was wrong, and Phelps-Roper showed her the gallery. Her mother quickly composed a triumphant blog post about the famine. ‘Thank God for famine in East Africa!’ she wrote. ‘God is longsuffering and patient, but he repays the wicked TO THEIR FACE!’ When Brittany Murphy died, Phelps-Roper had seen the disparity between her reaction and that of the rest of the church as a sign that something was wrong with her. Now the contradiction of her mother’s glee and her own sadness made her wonder if something was wrong with the church” (Chen 23). 

1.) “Megan tried to put herself in situations that challenged the intolerance she had been indoctrinated with. One evening, after speaking at a Jewish festival in Montreal, she and Grace passed a group of drag queens on the sidewalk outside a cabaret. She felt a surge of disgust, but when Grace asked if they could watch the show she agreed. ‘It felt illicit,’ she said. ‘Like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I’m here.’ She and Grace ended up dancing onstage during the intermission. Wherever Megan and Grace went, they met people who wanted to help them, despite all the hurt they had caused. The experience solidified Megan’s increasing conviction that no person or group could claim a monopoly on moral truth. Slowly, her fears about God’s judgment-the first terrifying understanding of her faith as a child, and its most stubborn remnant-faded. ‘As undeniable as they had seemed before, they seemed just as impossible now,’ she said” (Chen 35). 

3.) In your opinion, how did social media embolden Phelps-Roper’s initial message as a spokesperson for Westboro Baptist Church? How did interactions via social media influence her drastic shift in personal belief? Use at least two direct quotes, framed with help from our discussion/slides on Quote/the Quote Sandwich method, to support your claims. 

Social media emboldened Phelps-Roper’s initial message as a spokesperson for Westboro Baptist Church by providing Chen with the opportunity to write about the downsides of social media.

4.) “Anybody’s initial response to being confronted with the sort of stuff Westboro Baptist Church says is to tell them to f*** off,” said blogger David Abitbol (Chen 79). But it was less-aggressive communication styles that “got through” to Phelps-Roper, that in part influenced her to reconsider her belief system. What style(s) of conversation (consider message, tone, perspective) had the most impact on Phelps-Roper? What might her story teach us about confronting hate speech? What about redemption? 

The tone that had the most perspective on Phelps-Roper would be the respectful engagements she had with the people she interacted with on Facebook, who were trying to sway her views on religion and how she saw the world.

5.) If you were to meet Phelps-Roper today, what question would you want to ask her, and why?

As I annotated and scrutinized the article “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen, there was a specific matter that caught my attention. I became aware that Chen had discussed only to a certain extent what Phelps-Roper’s school life was like, and that the Westboro students quite often would encounter obstacles such as “dodging food hurled at them by incensed classmates” (Chen 6). My question is, how did Phelps-Roper and her religious affiliation peers endure these consequences they most likely experienced frequently? Did their classmates ever overstep any of their boundaries, or fight with their group? How did the teachers control the Westboro Baptist Church kids, and/or their classmates? The late 1900’s was a different time from now, which is why I am curious to what courses of action their teachers executed in this scenario. Why was Chen so vague about Phelps-Roper’s home and school life?