Remember When We Solved Problems Face-to-Face Instead of on Facebook?
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, we did not have social media. So when we got mad at someone, or when we felt that someone did us wrong, we would go to the proper authority and raise a complaint. The authority would then call for a meeting where the person complaining gets the chance to meet the subject of his complaint face to face. The parties would then talk things out – with the help of the authoirty who sort of mediates. Sometimes, they end up reconciled, and sometimes they end up hating each other even more, depending on the skill of the often-unwilling mediator.
I remember when I was in my Third Year in High School, there was a great issue concerning the graduating class. The mother of the Salutatorian complained why her daughter was not the Valedictorian. My mother was the Principal then. The Salutatorian’s mother went to my mother’s office with a lawyer, an accountant, and her own calculators, demanding a recomputation of her daughter’s grades. Nothing came out of it because the grades turned out to have been correctly computed, but at least the mother had her chance to face the daughter’s teachers and the opportunity to look into their class records.
Today, when someone gets mad at someone, he does not look for the authority to raise a complaint to. He goes to social media. What happens next is something akin to a lynching by a mob. The supposed offended party makes a one-sided story, and depending on how many friends he has on facebook, and how beautifully touching his story is written, the person written about – whether identified or not – receives lashings of all sorts. Not sticks and stones, but comments ugly enough to hurt the bones just the same.
Why Your Viral Call-Out Post Makes You Look Weak, Not Right
Why do we resort to social media? Have we so lost our self-worth as individuals that we cannot, on our own two feet, stand up and make a complaint against a supposed perpetrator without the support of our Facebook friends? Have we so forgotten what dignity feels like that we can no longer determine by ourselves whether or not we have indeed been maligned, and so we have to go and ask our Facebook friends for their opinion?
Going to social media and telling people your grievances is no different from taking a megaphone up and down the streets, screaming on top of your lungs about how one person has done you wrong. The only difference is that, if you take a megaphone to the streets, noone will go and scream with you because you will both look like idiots. On social media, it is easy for people to side with you, no matter how unreasonable you are, because they know that the rest of humanity cannot see them anyway.
Do not get misled. When you lash out at someone publicly on social media, and someone “agrees” with you in the comment section, it does not necessarily mean he thinks you are correct. Often, it simply means that he also hates the person you are talking about – or just plain hates the world in general – and is happy at the opportunity to ride along in your hate wagon.
If You Can’t Say It to Their Face, Don’t Post It Online.
So someone has offended you. Go talk to that someone. Or talk to his superior. Or do not talk at all. If you cannot even bring up the matter to the person’s face, you should never bring it up with the public, because the public has nothing to do with it. The public cannot resolve the issue, and involving the public can only blow the matter out of proportion. And if you bring it up with the public in order to get the public to side with you, you are nothing more than a wimp whose only power comes from the megaphone in his hand.
A note to the millenneals: consider yourselves lucky you have the internet at your disposal. But do not abuse it. Remember, anything is worth only as much as the good that it is used for.
