The Toxicity on Social Media
Having been a frequent visitor to Social Media in all these years, I can confidently say a lot has changed in how people perceive its usage now. If I look back at the excitement to create a Facebook Account in 2010, it was to share important moments with the people I knew. For an 11 year old, the world out there that was fitted inside a screen was magical. 10 years down the line, a lot has changed.
A recent study showed the tremendous rise of Media houses in the past six years. It is not important to dwell why, but it is important to think about the consequences it has had. As News started reaching our notifications and News-makers taking the liberty of this privilege, swapped elaborated explanations about what(s) and how(s) of an event with sensational headlines, ironically the quest for ‘information’ increased. It would be unfair to label the BREAKING NEWS as knowledge, but I can’t even go with ‘gossips’ for the purpose of this write-up!
However, since two years there has been a constant rise of what I like to call- ‘TOXIC WOKE-NESS’. The woke nature of people on Social Media is no longer encouraging but has rather become more threatening. The flagbeares of Online Activism have failed to achieve what the platform could really have been used for. What it has been reduced to is Changing Profile Pictures to Bold Pastel Colours, to spreading false propaganda driven content and to sensationalize every bit of information as Knowledge. When Comedians and Influencers give commentaries on Politics and Economy, we are bound to ponder that there is something seriously wrong with the way we build our opinions.
There are two ways to look at it. One, everyone knows everything. It is liberating as information is no longer restricted in some hands. It is people driven and stories from all around the world reach us hassle-free. However, this is a very glossy picture. A picture we have been fed over all these years. Bringing me to the second point. It is clear that freedom to express without any constraints comes at a price. A price called mis-information and Fake News. The rise in two has been apparent while suiting vested interests across all political ideologies. We have come to a point where even the Fact Checking Portals have been found to biased and funded through several organisations. It is difficult to believe what is true any longer. A man being lynched on the doors of a temple is a caste dispute for some and a property dispute for others. A riot in a city is a state driven act for some and manipulation of facts for others. Some find religion when labeling the oppressor and some while pointing out the victim. It is never a wholesome picture for anyone anymore. The use of 24 hour stories and tweets with content not suitable for every reader moves around un-apologetically. This is what I call TOXIC. The urge to sound well aware and well read has turned the users to constantly debate and hold strong opinions about things they might not really be aware of. Twitter, is one such example. Where hashtags determine what is to trend and where bots are used to manipulate a reader of what is really important.
Lessons of being politically, economically, socially aware and active are taught through Social Media, mostly through peer pressure. This comes often at the price of making a decision for yourself, if you really need to be doing it! The turn of events in the past one year has made this even clearer. We live in a cosmopolitan world, where an incident in one part of the world generates sympathy and even rage in rest of the world. At a larger level, it looks like one is standing for human solidarity, but at a deeper level, it is also the urge to not be left behind in the race of knowing everything. It is this TOXIC-ity which needs to be channelized to have a sane mind and a saner place on Social Media.
So what is to be done? Is it to bring in censored forums and portals? NO. To restrict the ability to express to a group of elites? Definitely NO. It is to have a tolerant yet critical attitude to the information we consume. The last 30 years have been about how governance should be people driven, and now when we are getting a little closer to being stakeholders in the decision making process, we must not let this opportunity go away. Even though information is as easily available as never before, it has even become more complex. The urge to know everything is not wrong, but the urge to know one side of everything is. To have derived conclusions even before the incident has set in, is something we need to do away with. Now is the time to bring one revolution here. Not from above, but from below.
