We probably also hoped that it would provide a space for views, debate by both experts and amateurs on a wide variety of topics, matters and concerns, while also giving online voice and opportunity to the voiceless, marginalised, atypical commentators and just ordinary folks: in other words, deepening and widening the democratic space, if you will.
I would like to assume that the expectation was that these voices, spaces and opportunity would be conveyed and harnessed in an atmosphere of decorum, civility, careful consideration and shared experiences. Instead and regrettably, social media has often wrought for us cacophony, insensitivity, shamelessness, morbid curiosity and plain mob psychology. Consider that this year alone, private correspondence between senior government officials, political party correspondence with party members, gory details about domestic violence, leaked funeral programmes, etc. have found themselves on social media as, you guessed right, matters of public spectacle!
With this experience, it is easy to regard social media as largely unabashed boasting or exaggeration of one’s attributes in beauty or taste, the places they patronise, the private communication they possess, the company they keep or the interactions they engage in.
Understood this way, reasonable people would treat it as more or less like reality television, or a type of written or pictorial escapism, only that it is in our mobile devices! Sometimes the simplest point is the most critical one: social media has pitifully become our online hysterical realism – a term coined by the English critic and intellectual, James Wood, in 2000. In our digital age, indeed, for social media, a version of hysterical realism will be the juxtaposition of mundane specific events in what we perceive as our unique lives with the superficiality of our ordinary lives.
Except in patchy circumstances, on social media and in instances that should invite reasoned and measured public discourse, is self-righteousness, quick judgement, fault finding, and absolutes. In social media, pretence is made at being a reliable source of news or information, almost every person is his or her own self-assessed expert, his own infallible pope, and everybody’s philosopher-king. As is and as designed, social media is, regrettably incapable of providing the tools that filter our passing passions on any matter. Outside social media, this necessary filtration happens largely through these mechanisms: the abiding acknowledgement that one knows far little than they are willing to admit, the time it takes to write something such as this or its equivalent, the closer, sometimes independent review of one’s written opinions, and the realisation that Google is a good search engine, not an excellent library.
You may ask, given this, what shall we do? First, I think like Socrates, we need to admit that the beginning of our wisdom is an acknowledgement that we know nothing, even on social media. Small wonder that King Solomon, almost 500 years before Socrates, asked of God and was granted, wisdom. The request was atypical of monarchs then, and is probably so, even now. King Solomon clearly had the perspicacity to know that wisdom, like its opposite, stupidity, has consequences, in and for all of us.
Second, we need to recognize that certainly every one of us could have an opinion, and if so, we all have a right to share that opinion, including on social media. Of course, the right to share an opinion does not mean that all opinions have equal value or that all of them deserve anything more than an offhand dismissal. When we put forth a view on any matter, on social media, as well as elsewhere, we ought to accept that our views on it have different value. There will be some views that are light and amount to nothing. These, necessarily do not advance the propagation of one’s opinion in any useful manner. Then there will be some views that, if conveyed properly, it becomes easy for others to believe in and accept them, as they are grounded on something brilliant, in and outside of them.
Third, good manners, even on social media are essential and indicative of who we are. Disrespectful comment, meanness and boorish behaviour often convey our level of (or lack of) other regarding-ness, than they seek to address the matter in the public domain. Those who have a certain amount of social media following - call them influencers, celebrities, the Twitterati or any term appropriate to them – have an especial responsibility to ensure that their presence and that of their followers on social media does not invite Heaven’s damnation of the worst angels of our human natures or the heavy-handed snooping of governments! In service to their online followers, influencers, celebrities, the Twitterati or whatever we call them, ought to be alert to the common misuse of social media and the consequences that can flow from that misuse.
In the spirit of the end of the year celebrations, however, truncated and disrupted by the presence of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in our midst, I ask that we each adopt a 2021 New Year resolution to disagree without being disagreeable and that we accept that our presence on social media if done properly can be a school of decorum where we learn to loosen ourselves from the stranglehold of digital incivility and impatience.
If we could do this, our usage of social media would, in my view, demonstrate the attention, care and deliberate intent to communicate with, and invite others to engage us, in circumstances of decency, taste and personal touch.
Done this way, our participation in social media could serve as everybody’s personalised love letter on-the-go. Now, on the cusp of a new year, would be the best time to write that figurative letter!
BONGI D D M RADIPATI*
*Bongi D D M Radipati admits that writing, like thinking, is hard.
