12/27/13 19:56
As if to underscore what a
rising trend this is,
another stark case of a single career-destroying tweet consumed the Internet last weekend. This one appears like an open and shut case: Justine Sacco, a PR executive (!) at a leading tech company published a racist and insensitive tweet before boarding a long flight for South Africa. By the time she landed, she was a top trending topic on Twitter, was the butt of jokes, and had even received death threats. She was summarily fired from her job.
There's no question what she wrote was incredibly stupid and indefensible. Even all the most charitable can say is that she may have been trying to be darkly ironic, in a twisted way.
So what leads otherwise intelligent and savvy people like Justine Sacco to apparently commit career suicide like this?
I have a theory. But first, a riddle:
Satirical stand up comedy is largely a Western phenomenon. These are live,
solo acts, typically of a
guy and a mic talking about all aspects of life. Interjected with copious amounts of profanity are sometimes deeply insightful nuggets into the human condition.
Why is it that certain ideas and observations somehow go hand in hand with this particular format?
Historically, stand up comedy descends from the role of a
Court Jester. Jesters were employed not only to entertain, but to also provide a contrarian and critical view to their masters:
“Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests. Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558–1603) is said to have rebuked one of her fools for being insufficiently severe with her.” -- Royal Shakespeare Company, via Wikipedia.
If you were a powerful person, no one in your inner circle would likely challenge your ideas, even when they thought you were wrong. This led to a problem: How to balance viewpoints to result in better decisions? How to even raise difficult subjects? The Jester was one such device, acting as a Devil's Advocate to raise unpopular truths.
Some truths are just so controversial and painful that they need to be masked with intense humor or deft satire to even be palatable.
The key word is
deft. When South Park raises controversial issues, we allow ourselves to laugh (or at the very least shake our heads), but when one of us raises the issue poorly (even if we have god intentions), it might just get us fired, or worse.
Even the most straight laced of us will discuss controversial subjects with our closest friends in the privacy of our homes, or perhaps over coffee. We may even play the role of a Jester in raising these issues, to present an extreme viewpoint for discussion, or to simply make a fairly morbid or dry subject slightly interesting.
As more and more of our correspondence migrates online into semi-public spaces, we continue to employ familiar patterns of communication. Certainly, we are aware that other people may be listening, but social media has several unfortunate characteristics that can cause us to lower our guard to the point of catastrophe:
Social media presents us with new forms of conversations. For example, if someone asks you a question on Twitter and you respond, you are both of course publishing that correspondence to all your combined followers, and (for public accounts) to the entire world if they cared to tune in.
Global conversations do not happen in real life outside of the Internet, and it is very easy to forget that it is happening. Both online and offline, we tend to get caught up in our conversations, becoming oblivious to bystanders. Imagine making a foolish remark in a bar. Perhaps the worst that could happen is that it sparks a fight constrained to that location. Online, this can spiral into a global condemnation, within mere hours.
It used to be a difficult feat to piss off a million people at once. Now apparently, almost anyone can do it with just a click.
Social media is designed to give a facade of intimacy, but buying too much into this facade can be dangerous.
Even our loyal “followers" don't really have a good idea of who we are.
Here's a simple test: How much can you say you know about the people you follow online? Do you know anything about their family backgrounds? What causes they invest their time in? Do you even know what music they like? Sure, we can all make instant stereotypical generalizations, but how much are you willing to bet they are true?
Now, just realize that
everyone else has the same level of knowledge about you, and will be making the same instant generalizations.
Why do people make salacious or borderline offensive comments in the first place? To get attention of course. We can't help it. As humans we are primed to pay attention to controversy or conflict.
In the attention-deficit world of social media, carefully tuning messages to sound controversial is a common technique to gain attention. The problem is that as the signal-to-noise ever decreases, we are driven to increase the amount of controversy over time.
This happens in all media - witness the rise of controversy even in broadcast news programs. Publishers are fighting a losing battle for attention.
The problem is that even we as individuals find that we now have to fight that same battle.
Here's something you may not even realize: When you post something on Facebook, there's no guarantee that all your friends will see it. By default, Facebook displays “
Top Stories” in the newsfeed. These are posts filtered by their proprietary, and ever-changing algorithms. Yup, this means that Facebook decides who sees your posts, and even when they see it.
We are being forced to play the attention game
even with our closest friends.
People whose jobs depend on gaining attention have it much worse. They now need to use all the tricks in the book and pull out all the stops in order to get it, and sooner or later some are going to cross the line.
It's bad enough that written words can't convey emotion very well. Humor and irony in particular are extremely difficult to communicate correctly using words alone.
But it gets worse. Another treacherous aspect of Twitter, in particular is its 140 character limit. The forced brevity all but guarantees that our words will be taken out of context even more often than they would normally be.
Even without this artificial limit, virtually all social media platforms are designed around brief and instantaneous communications, and the shift to mobile makes this more so.
So not only do we need to write shorter sentences in much less time, we often are writing on cramped keypads while distracted doing something else.
It's a marvel that
all our tweets and posts aren't ill conceived.
Here's the most chilling danger: Mobs of people are just about the most vicious organism in the known universe, and this monster lives just a click away from every one of us.
As we've seen in countless examples so far, seemingly mild mannered, highly educated and well-paid people living in the most “developed" corners of society will tear even one of their own into shreds. All without a drop of compassion or even a twinge of self irony at what's happening. Our torches are all lit, and the pitchforks are ready to go.
I have no doubt that we will be seeing more and more cases like this, because the dynamics of social media make it all but a
conventuality.
How might things improve?
For starters, we need to wake up and realize just
how serious public communication is. We've been lulled into a false sense of security and privacy. Posting anything online isn't the same as a conversation in your living room, no matter how cute the background wallpaper on the website is.
We need to think of every post like we would an article we might post in a major newspaper, with our picture, name, and address on it. That's closer to what it really is.
Finally, we need to collectively grow up and become
better Internet citizens. No, I’m not holding my breath for this one, but I am optimistic that our attitudes will improve over time. For starters, life “online” and “offline" is
just a blur now. When
all of us realize that our online actions have real-world consequences, we will behave better, and treat one another better.
I just hope that happens sooner than later.
Jeff Bercovici has a few more thoughts on the Justine Sacco case.
Allen Pike wrote a thoughtful essay on the balance of being human and “unprofessional” in social media and products.
Related: Society.