How funny it is that just as easily as lifting someone’s spirits you can also devastate them with just a few choice words.
Social media, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. has made us all into mini-celebrities able to mass communicate with friends, neighbours, work colleagues and vague acquaintances at the click of a button. People are now finding long lost loves just as easily as they are getting the sack because of the click of a harmless mouse.
The courage to ‘say something out loud’ seems to be exponentially enhanced by a keyboard or touch screen and things you hitherto would never dream of saying when face to face with someone you seem to find yourself all too easily blurting out via the power of the worldwide web. But worse than just saying something in the heat of the moment you have now broadcast it permanently to everyone you know (and some you don’t, depending on how hot you are with your privacy settings). We are all ill-equipped for such social responsibility. Even minor celebrities have PR advisors, we have none and fall foul of our naïve, albeit good, intentions far too easily.
Ironically, those most vulnerable are often the more frequent users of these contact points. For example, new and highly hormonal sleep-deprived mums trapped at home dreaming of adult contact live their lives vicariously through their laptops and tablets. And as any rational person knows you will never be at your most logical just after a 4 am feed so watch out if you comment on a post or hit that like button only to realise the next morning (or when the latest sleepy haze passes over) that you have upset someone, sometimes irrevocably. That is absolutely the last thing you can cope with at the best of times but tired and emotional and you will find your ability to shrug something off almost completely disabled.
Rediscovering school friends you only had contact with between the ages of 11 and 16 may well seem harmless enough but now their lives have moved on and they are no longer the same people you went to school with. Just one glance at your teenage notebooks and their excruciatingly self-centred ramblings are frightening enough and your own fair hand wrote them so how can you possibly know how to communicate with somebody else’s grown-up self? Don’t be fooled that your shared history gives you the right to be bold when reacquainting yourself with your old school chum. Quite the opposite! The normal reserve you keep in check in your day-to-day life be it social or work is not something you should easily disregard. It keeps you out of trouble and the fact that you have a few thousand miles and a computer screen between you does not make them, or sadly you, invincible.
A misplaced exclamation mark can turn a sentence from a joke to an arrogant tease in one person’s eyes. Caps locks apparently mean you are aggressive and shouty and woe betide you if you put a comma in the wrong place and completely alter the emphasis of an innocent sentence! (Sorry to anyone I offended with that overexcited symbol by the way). It seems that the only way to survive in the internet communication world is to spell everything out very clearly, with over detailed definitions at all times and never, ever think that sarcasm works in the written form. Facebook was invented in America remember where sarcasm equals facetiousness and it is extremely difficult for anyone to realise you are joking without expression or background giggle to go along with it. Always be overly polite and perhaps a little too complimentary (again something we Brits are not naturally comfortable with) because it is better to leave the impression of being just a little bit too nice than being accused of being hard-nosed and smug.
So in the absence of a GCSE in how to handle social media fame (whatever the scale) please be wary of every keystroke or screen sweep. For just as many of the likes you will undoubtedly get on your latest witty status update, you will find yourself under attack or suffering the silent treatment from the most unlikely of people (or so you thought in your previous non-Facebook relationship) and completely at a loss to what you have done or how you can make sure you don’t do it again. There are considerable highs to be had with this internet thingy but be aware of the pitfalls too.
Have you ever published something on the net that you can’t take back?
