Hate it, but Ape it


Santosh Desai cited an instance of a recent victim of social media, an award winning Indian chef in Dubai. Angry with the portrayal of Hindus as terrorists in an American serial, he let fly about Islam. There was a reaction to that, and at the end of it all, he’d lost his restaurant.

Desai focuses the rest of the blog on why people land on these situations via social media, even though we’ve heard of others who paid a heavy price:
“There is something about social media that encourages this kind of gratuitous sharing… In real life, we are aware of the fact that our actions and words have real world consequences. We are careful about expressing opinions, and are mindful of how others might react. This is why we back-bite (and not front-nibble) and why gossip is whispered, not shouted or broadcast. But on social media, we lose this self-imposed restraint, because of an illusion of detached distance.”
With social media, on the one hand:
“The opinions we hold about the world are becoming an increasingly central part of our self-identity. We feel the need to express a view on virtually every major event in the world and hold strong views on things political and otherwise.”
Every action then has an opposite (if not equal) reaction, via the same social media:
“Every strong opinion is likely to find support as well as attract venomous anger.”

This side of social media may well be one of the reasons why the “regular” media tries to stay away and is contemptuous of it. Also, because the age of the average person on regular media is, well, old. But that’s probably starting to change, laments ex-New York Times editor, Jill Abramson:
“From four years of teaching at Harvard, so many of my students are interested in journalism, but they mostly want to write first-person, highly personal narratives about themselves. That may reflect their age. But I think there’s too much of that in journalism. It’s not about us. It’s about the world, and covering the world.”

If you see how the English news channels sound in India today, they sound exactly like Abramson’s Harvard students. Except, they like to talk down to everyone as if their view is some objective, universal truth. While regular media may not want to be on social media (entirely), they sure behave the same way a lot of the time.

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