A few years ago and in a different town to where I live now, there was a letter in the local paper castigating the local community for not supporting a concert of some sort in a local venue.
The message was that this group had worked hard to put this concert on, it was excellent, and we (the local people) should be ashamed of ourselves that only 15 or 20 people showed up to watch. How can we expect groups to bother putting entertainment on in our town if we don’t support them?
The fact that a) this was not a local group but a touring group of some sort; b) there had been almost no publicity for it other than a poster on the notice board of the venue; and c) people neither have the time nor money to attend all the entertainments put on (such is our fixation on constant entertainment these days), seem not to have occurred to the writer.
I am often reminded of this episode as I see social media posts along these sort of lines. Something I care about didn’t or doesn’t get much support, how unfair/immoral/unkind this is, how awful you who disagree are for not seeing how important/necessary this is etc.
My specific problem with these sort of posts?
It’s a distasteful cocktail of narcissism and arrogance (everyone should agree with me on what’s important) trying to hide behind a highly dubious if not downright false claim of victimhood.
Social media makes these sort of instant emotional rantings very easy.
Again, many years ago, I learnt the hard way about NOT sending Mr Angry/Offended replies to emails.
For the last 25+years now, if my knee-jerk emotional response to an electronic communication is to type an accusatory or ‘how dare you’ or ‘you’re an idiot’ response, the first thing I do before typing anything is to delete the address of the recipient. This allows me to let off steam as I like without the danger of hitting the send button, only to regret it later.
I allow time for my better self to re-establish the dominant position and re-write the email using less emotive language, while still getting my view across.
My suggestion for everyone using social media is similarly to write a post or response out not on the platform itself but in a separate word document. This allows time to calm down and allow your more rational reasonable self to re-establish itself before cutting and pasting the better reply across into the social media post.
The issue that instant social media replies shows is that there are some who think their knee-jerk highly emotional first thought is normal rational thinking and others who seem more than happy to be whipped up and to whip others up into a frenzy on a regular basis.
This is no way for important decisions to be made, topics discussed or attitudes to be formed.
Finger-wagging or ‘how dare you’ posts, along with using aggressive language or personal insult or blocking people who disagree with you politely, are all signs of us not being in control of our emotions. Not allowing our better judgement time to dominate our instant emotional reactions.
Note that I am NOT saying that you shouldn’t say WHAT you think. I AM saying that HOW we say things matters enormously both to personal and societal harmony and instant emotion-lead reactions to reading posts you don’t agree with is both your enemy and by extension that of our wider society.
