Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Unsoical Mediation

"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. 

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