Under what conditions, other than renown, is it possible for the media to provoke displays of global empathy or mourning for people we have never met? The question is an especially fraught one at a time when mainstream media has lost much of its authority, and the prevalence of social media platforms has created new ways in which public grief can be expressed and policed.

Among a random selection of 10 comments on a recent Taylor Swift Instagram post, two are collections of heart emojis, three declare their love, with variations in spelling and length (‘Lolololoveeeeee’), one announces that ‘I drew Taylor!!’ and another disturbingly and impenetrably explains that it is ‘so good to be sweet’. One girl tells Taylor ‘You should’ve invited me @taylorswift’ to the perfectly lit scene. It’s safe to assume that Taylor does not know these people.

We should, of course, defend the right to a free internet. But this involves restructuring the culture of the digital world.

The Twitter bio for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union reads: ‘We are Australia's oldest and biggest union for manufacturing workers’. It sits directly above an image of Bill Shorten's head superimposed onto a cartoon frog riding a unicycle. The Bill Shorten/frog hybrid exclaims, ‘Here comes dat boi!!!’ Welcome to Australian politics in 2016.

Facing each other across Lake Burley Griffin are two government buildings collecting information about the lives of Australians. On one side is the National Library, a concrete and marble edifice inspired by ancient Greek temples and open to the public seven days a week. Facing it are the new ASIO headquarters, the one-way glass exterior symbolising an organisation keen to see everything happening outside, even as it hides everything going on inside.

This is the story of three white men who lost their jobs. SBS sports reporter Scott McIntyre, for a series of critical tweets on Anzac Day; British lawyer Clive O’Connell, for a tirade captured on video against fans of the Liverpool football club, and people from Liverpool generally; Sydney hotel supervisor Michael Nolan, for posting abuse on the Facebook page of feminist writer Clementine Ford. One of these things, of course, is not like the others.

The bullets had scarcely stopped flying in Paris before the pressure was on. There were the profile pictures filtered with le Tricolore or changed to show the user on holiday in Paris; the memes with cartoons by Charlie Hebdo illustrator Joann Sfar or words by Martin Luther King Jr; the condemnations of religious fundamentalism and pleas for tolerance on behalf of the peaceful majority of the world’s Muslims. The counter narrative went hand-in-hand: what about Beirut, we were asked with varying degrees of sanctimoniousness, where Islamic State militants had killed 41 people the day before the Paris attacks?

It was Back to the Future Day on 21 October – that is, the day on which Marty McFly and Doc Brown crash-landed the DeLorean into 2015 in Back to the Future II – and Queensland law enforcement decided to get in on the fun. The Mount Isa Police Department issued a statement saying that officers from the ‘Hoverboard Unit’ had attended a crash on Rodeo Drive.

‘Why would they publish that!?’ is a common refrain encountered by almost any editor nowadays. We see them all too, by the way – your tweets are not invisible – and I tend to have a stock response: angry/disappointed social media user, aren’t you curious about what this person thinks?

Interactivity is considered one of the defining features of the online experience, yet the reality of most media consumers today is one defined by interpassivity. And it presents a serious challenge for those of us engaged in online journalism.

It is sometimes almost as fun to say that online publishing is alive and kicking as much as it is to say that it’s dead in the ground. Neither are actually true – there is a heartbeat, but it skips. Yet the debate is loud enough to sustain the careers of several ‘news gurus,’ as Dean Starkman calls them – Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Michael Wolff, and a handful of other scribblers scribbling about the state of media and journalism and content.

As is frequently the case in these matters, I wonder idly how Gramsci would feel about his writings being used as articles of faith, as opposed to starting points for a critical engagement with the present. Were he alive today, I like to think that he would search for new answers to some of these old questions, or at least attempt to reframe them. For the problem of how to enforce party discipline in the age of social media is not the exclusive preserve of democratic centralists.

I want to treat language with respect. But I also want to respect the people who use it. And this is why no linguistic error will ever make me roll my eyes more than miserly nitpickers - often anonymous - who take it upon themselves to correct others' spelling, grammar and punctuation online.

In that sense, then, #freshinourmemories can be seen as exemplary rather than anomalous - a reminder that there's no human misery from which someone won't try to make a buck and that profiteering was widespread during the war years. Indeed, Woolworths' specific slogan actually tells us more about the Great War than the anodyne rhetoric of the official commemoration.

The popularity of gifs, memes and listicles underscore our fragmented, and simultaneously, overloaded visual culture, which flourishes with an excess of images, videos and visual media online. It is now with great pleasure that many of us turn to BuzzFeed lists and indulge in an article or two.