Posted by Deepak Chopra defines social media as the extension of our brains. He believes that we are all creating and contributing to the collective unconsciousness, or global brain, every time we Tweet, Facebook, and share online.
It is an exciting thought and a digital extension of the sentiment expressed by personal development author Jim Rohn when he said: You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
With social media, it is so easy to pick five inspirational voices with which to create new neural pathways in your own brain. With our portable devices, these people can be with you wherever you go, ready with a wise word anytime you want to think something different. And you can be the inspirational voice in someone else’s brain.
And yet! Sunday, was International Friendship day. Some twitter users marked the occasion by having a day of #twittersilence. The tag and silence was used as a protest against the online abuse certain high-profile women have been subjected to on twitter. Other users felt that by having 24 hours silence, the trolls would win, so they carried on tweeting using #shoutingback or #inspiringwomen tags.
Online abuse and web-based hate crime is the dark side of social media and indeed, of humanity. In the Guardian, Police Chief Andy Trotter called on social media companies to crack down on crimes committed on their platforms, saying they have the ingenuity to come up with solutions.
Trotter’s solution is a good one. Social media platforms could automatically police online hatred. It is common enough in the workplace to bounce back email when it contains unacceptable words. Couldn’t social media do the same and train users to be kinder to each other?
After all, uses who engage in this sort of behaviour are breaking the law. Do users need to be educated about the legalities of using social media? Attacks on individuals such as politicians and celebrities have long been common, even applauded in traditional broadcast media, so the line between ‘righteous’ commentary and plain old abuse has been blurry for a while.
In June, the Daily Mail published an article claiming that Hilaria Baldwin was tweeting during James Gandolfini’s funeral. The Guardian has a full outline of the events here.
The first question when looking at this ‘news’ item has to be: What’s the story? Is it news to report someone’s tweets with an intent to criticise? Wasn’t there enough news that day already? The funeral of a great actor, the continuing crisis in Syria, the violence in Egypt.
With everyone now having the tools to delivers ‘news’ and provide commentary, a lot of it doesn’t go through the standard filters of veracity, ethics, and media law that used to happen when newspapers and trained journalists did all the publishing. Even before the change in the broadcast landscape there was a thirst for celebrity news, which was gradually changing from admiration to criticism.
Is this a good use of our global brain? Chopra believes that we should form a community of humanity so that we can use social media as a tool to spread love, wisdom, and positive transformation rather than hatred and abuse. It is easy to criticise but hard to provide solutions.
We are all capable of wielding great power for good and for bad with the social media tools we have at hand. As Peter Parker‘s Uncle Ben said, mangling up a bit of Voltaire as Peter Parker got used to his spidey-powers:
With great power comes great responsibility.
We must teach ourselves to take responsibility for our actions and our words and think carefully about the effect they have on other people. If we created an environment where everyone felt valued and heard, perhaps the need to attack others online or in print would diminish. And in that space who knows what we could achieve?
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