I acknowledge there is a place for it but, as Miss Joe Average, I ask myself “has the advent of social media robbed the world of its humanity?”
I constantly find myself wondering why common manners and ethics seem to fall by the wayside when people get the opportunity to share private details of other people’s lives.
There seems to be no thought given to the repercussions of a social media post and how it will affect those you are talking about, even when you are posting something seemingly about yourself.
A prime example of this is a Facebook post about how a “friend” was battling to cope with the imminent death of her mother.
The writer explained that the elderly woman, while visiting my friend in Ireland, had fallen ill, landed up in hospital and after a difficult surgery was not expected to live more than a day or two.
It was an emotional outpouring and as expected my friend received condolences and support from her friends.
However, what she failed to consider was the effect of her post on other people.
The dying woman happened to be my grandmother and I was unaware of her illness, let alone her prognosis.
This impersonal post is how I discovered my gran was dying.
I had forgotten about this post until I saw two declarations, by different couples, of pending divorce.
These casual, almost throw-away posts once again made me ask whether the writers had even considered the possible dire consequences of their announcements for their families or were they just selfishly seeking sympathy?
Did either of these couples stop to think about how their actions would impact their children or ask whether their children approved of this information being put into the public domain where friends and their parents would have a front-row seat to their strife?
While family dramas are far removed from international catastrophe, this selfish mindset, which is becoming the norm, spreads from sharing family secrets to exposing information which could devastate people you’ve never met.
Frigyes Karinthy posited the idea of six degrees of separation which states all living things, everywhere in the world, can be connected within six steps working on the idea of “a friend of a friend”, which sees every person linked to every other person on earth in no more than six steps.
This means your posts have the power to harm someone a world away without your knowledge or care, all so that you have the self gratification of sharing a gory photo before anyone else.
This is a grave reality when citizens take it upon themselves to post photos or information they have no business sharing.
Take for instance the passenger who, seeing a serious accident on the highway, takes a colour photo and posts it showing the registration of the car and perhaps the make clearly identifiable with a caption reading: “Terrible accident on the N12. No way the driver is coming out alive.”
This heartless post may be the way someone discovers their loved one is dead.
Adding to their anguish, they now have a horrific picture proving how scary or painful that person’s last minutes of earth must have been.
I left asking myself once again: is it really the casual observer’s right to bring someone else’s world crashing around them like this?
Do we really have so little respect for other people that the sick joy derived from shocking our friends with a gory photo or spreading salacious gossip takes precedence over another person’s right to privacy in their lowest moments?
