A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.