Social media provides instant communication but has dumbed us down
Social media, like everything, has pluses and minuses, pros and cons.
By JPOST EDITORIALPeople holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in this illustration picture taken September 27, 2013.(photo credit: REUTERS/KACPER PEMPEL)
On the plus side of the ledger is that it provides instant and easy communication with people around the world, allows us to connect with old friends and provides an easy platform for organizations and entrepreneurs.And on the con side it raises all kinds of privacy issues, gives a wide platform to promote noxious ideas and has dumbed down dialogue.There is so much out there on social media, so much noise, that many feel the need to scream and shout in order to be heard above the din. Moderate, nuanced, polite comments are lost amid those attention-grabbing tweets or Facebook posts from the edges.In the 21st century, and all around the world, public discourse has become coarse, and part of the reason for that coarseness is that the instant nature and easy anonymity of social media yields itself to the nasty, the snarky and the snide. Dignified discourse has become the casualty.On Tuesday, veteran Channel 12 journalist Dana Weiss announced intent to sue Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair for a downright mean tweet about her filled with a nasty innuendo. “Does anyone know how Dana Weiss got such a senior position on Channel 2(sic)?” he wrote. “Eloquent? No. Smart? no. Interesting ….”Weiss, in an interview on Army Radio, said the tweet was not only degrading, but also a form of sexual harassment. “A red line was crossed,” she said. “What is at stake here is how we relate to women. Because no matter what a woman does, how much she has achieved and what status she has attained, someone will come and say it all has to do with gender.”Weiss is right in taking fierce issue with the ugly tweet, though whether this constitutes sexual harassment can be debated. She said bringing this suit against Netanyahu - whom last year she called a “crappy kid,” an expression she later apologized for – will be worth the trouble if others will “think twice before writing something or tweeting or re-tweeting something that is completely fake.”Words matter, she continued, even when they are on Twitter or the web. “A lie is a lie, and a person’s dignity – the dignity of a woman – are serious matters.”Words matter even more when the person talking, tweeting or writing has public standing or a position of stature. If this is true in the case of the son of the Israeli prime minister, it is even truer in the case of the president of the US.US President Donald Trump ignited yet another firestorm earlier this week when he hinted in a tweet, and suggested later at a press conference, that his caustic media critic Joe Scarborough was somehow involved in the 2001 death of his aide Lori Klausuits when Scarborough was a congressman.Scarborough, a former Republican representative from Florida, is now host of the MSNBC “Morning Joe” talk show. He had announced his retirement from Congress two months before the death, which an autopsy showed was caused by a blow to the head that resulted from a fall likely connected to an undiagnosed heart ailment. Scarborough was in Washington at the time, and the death was ruled accidental.Yet that did not prevent Trump, the president of the most powerful nation in the world, from tweeting: “So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair?”On Thursday, Trump continued his attacks, although this time against Twitter itself, warning that his administration will take action against the social media platform after it placed a fact-check label on some of his tweets.What is happening on Twitter – by Yair Netanyahu and Trump – should have no place in our political or public discourse. It’s time to get a grip, and for everyone – from ordinary citizens to the son of a prime minister and the president of the US himself – to realize that words do matter, and dragging public discourse into the gutter is extremely corrosive for society.
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