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| "John S. has responded to your comment . . ." |
You all know the feeling. Flipping through your news feed
you see some joke, some picture, some meme, some comment. You consider yourself
cavalier when it comes to political correctness, but you see this right thing
at the right time in light of the right events and it manages to irk you. To
get under your digital skin.
Pick
your issue, but all of us no matter how tolerant have some group that is ne touch
pas.
Before
you react you may have the wisdom or at least the experience to reproach
yourself, to remind yourself that no good can come from taking a stand on a digital
timeline. But, dammit, you’re peeved. Finally, for whichever of the thousand
justifications you have that all basically sound the same and add up to the
same, you react, you respond.
You
comment. You hit reply and say your piece.
A few
minutes later, the offending party responds. Or one of their supporters does.
Or one of yours. Or some innocent bystander, some patronizing pedant, some
deliberately offensive troglodyte, some bleeding heart.
Knowing
what you’ve got yourself into but unable to resist, you respond to the
response.
And we’re
off. Like a starburst of dominoes, the “debate” goes out, drawing from all, affecting all, swaying none none.
If I
may for a time continue with my second-person hypothetical, in the eventual
fallout of this ultimately useless argument, perhaps you say or have said to
you some nasty words. Maybe you come away resenting an actual human because of
their online expression of self. Maybe the real person
and created persona begin to blend in your head.
So
maybe you see the folly in this—once again—and you decide—once again—to swear
off debating on this particular social medium. Maybe—once again—you start
calling into question what good this medium is actually
bringing to your life, to the world, to rhetoric. Maybe you quit cold turkey,
feeling a sense of freedom. You indulge in your human relationships, finding
yourself agreeing readily with points that don’t reflect you
ideologically and spiritually to the letter.
A day
of this new found freedom goes by. Another. Someone posts an article or a joke
and tags you. In person they berate you for not responding, for not ratifying
their existence with commentary in the public sphere. You start getting emails
from medium itself telling you there’s stuff you’re missing, like you stepped
out of a loud party for some fresh air but someone keeps calling for you.
You
start to get antsy, start to feel withdrawn. You tell yourself you’ll have one
quick look. “Just one.”
Next
thing you know, you’re right back where you started.
And
yes, the diction’s intentional: this experience is supposed to sound like that experience. And no, I don’t think
that’s over-stating it.
Because
I think addicts would attest that only at the deepest in their drug would
they show how truly awful good people can be.
Several
times I’ve “quit” Facebook. I'm certainly not very active—outside of elections—compared
to what I was a few years back. I’d like to avoid it, but the fact is I still
find it the best way to interact with many of my distant friends, and yes,
sometimes I find vines, videos, and George Takei entertaining. I deplore those
who treat anything that’s posing as news on Facebook as news and I also tire of those who use it to feed their
narcissism. That said, the only hard rule for Facebook behaviour is that how you
behave on Facebook is how someone says you shouldn’t behave on Facebook.
In the
decade or so of the term and the medium’s existence, social media with
Facebook and Twitter as the flagships have degraded. Like the Internet itself, they began as something that offered so much to so many but are now just barely
doing anything, and much of the time doing more harm than good.
It—yes,
I’m using this singular pronoun for “social media” if you’ll forgive my catch-all c.2009
jingoism, because IT is the word for addiction and cancer—is the place we see humans being terrible. Sometimes hiding in
anonymity, but at least hiding behind a digital ID that we have all agreed to
consider as different than an actual human, people say and do things that are
simply unacceptable and we accept them because of the venue.
It’s
no good. I’m calling us out. We’re a bunch of digital brutes.
And I’m
not saying I’m not guilty. I’ve often used it as a forum for my political
views, but I’d say I’m very rare in that I’m clear that there’s a line between
politics and personality, between ideology and prejudice. Facebook and Twitter
abound in racism, sexism, and most of all the unrepentant, glaring perpetuation
of ignorance. Dare I say it, our social media have become the playground of the
wilfully stupid.
Where
my mind fair boggles is that still, after some twenty years of accessible
public Internet, it's hunky dory to be racist, sexist, dumb
and loud, etc. on-line, as if who we are and what we do in that most public of forums is still sort of
not us, not real. We’re just pretending
to promote hate, not really doing it.
Fact:
many people I know behave on-line in a manner they wouldn’t dare in real, human life. Twenty years ago, they never would’ve opened their doors and hollered “Don’t
you hate Muslims?” They’d never knowingly put up a billboard that deliberately
misinformed or, worse, believe any billboard they saw as truth. They’d never come up to a
random stranger reading a newspaper and start an argument about an opinion
piece that ended up in a contest of personal insults.
Yet
these same folks post racist rants, share and believe memes that my pet fish
could sling together and call “facts,” or patrol the comments sections of news
pieces looking to pick a fight.
(Incidentally,
the CBC’s disabling of comments on indigenous news pieces due to hate posts is an
indication of a bigger issue. There has never been a justification for the
comments sections of online news, and it does us nothing but bad as a species
that they continue to exist.)
I
actually believed that we were outgrowing “I’m not a racist/sexist/homophobe/moron,
but . . .” as an introduction to something decidedly
racist/sexist/homophobic/moronic, but it’s wormed its way into our on-line
lexicon. It’s become acceptable. Every
avatar feels the pedantic right to “Well, actually” on any post by anyone about
anything. And to be pretty darn petty whilst doing so too.
Facebook
started out as something good and bad. So did Twitter. Ironically, this step
forward in communication has meant a gigantic step backward in our social
evolution.
Facebook
and Twitter, and their many bastard offspring, are where people feel safe being
awful. Wanton bigotry and stupidty reign.
Social
media. It’s full of media, but it’s hardly social. Facebook is where we deface ourselves because
of its facelessness. And Twitter is where we’re twits.
Stop
it.
