To an extent, I get it. I mean, it’s satisfying, isn’t it? A good bit of outrage. You get a brief burst of feeling that sense of moral superiority over someone else. “I am outraged because I would never behave like that and therefore I am better.” Whether we like to admit or not, we’ve all got a bit of that inside us. Without that, the Daily Mail would not have been able to operate in the way it has done for many, many years (combined, of course, with an ability to tap into and exploit people’s fears).
The current problem is that social media is not nuanced enough to allow for proper debate on a number of issues, having to reduce everything down to small, digestible, character-limited soundbites; the result of this being that people’s “offence glands” (for want of a better term) are not only prodded into action but are then seen as the only responses that need to be adhered to. This is further stoked by the trend in modern journalism to rely on a limited pool of social media responses as the main sources of “truth” for many an article (as previously discussed here - the trend of “so-and-so said something and the internet is furious”). The difficulty being that for every genuine case where something worthy of apology is highlighted, there are many others in which people are backed into a corner or shamed over something that doesn’t really deserve the disproportionate response it gets.**
Many years ago, I used to frequent several internet forums*** and the overriding issue with most of them was that you were never more than two comments away from someone calling someone else a Nazi. Social media has contracted that even further. You wouldn't (or you shouldn’t really attempt to, in my opinion) have a meaningful discussion with someone via text message as it is robbed of tone, expression and inflection. The same rules should apply for how to approach interactions on social media.
What’s the solution here? If I knew that, the world would be a much less stressy place. For me, this first step is not to just react to something posted on a social platform as the truth (easier said than done, yes, and I’m still guilty of doing this). Read around, find out more, direct responses to the right people, don’t get drawn into insults over debate. It is easy to say, of course, but very few things worth doing are ever completely easy. In a world where people in positions of power are more and more comfortable with promoting blatant lies in order to further their own agendas, personally I’d like to see us move from a society that it becoming prone to knee-jerk reactions to internet offence to one that it is using its critical faculties and questioning what we see more. Idealistic? Maybe but I’d like to think it’s possible for my own sanity if nothing else.
* Well, not everyone but near enough. Oddly, three of my oldest friends don’t really go in for social media (with the exception of one who’s on Twitter - hey, Rich, in case you clicked though…)
** In terms of public internet shaming, Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” is a fascinating take on the subject.
*** Should that be “fora”? I think so but I’m not sure I’m ready for that level of pedantic accuracy just yet...
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