I grew up in the age of old school technology. We had a VCR, WAIT no, it was a BETA VCR!
A few people had those brick-sized cell phones, and they certainly didn’t have a built in camera.
Actual cameras were only available in analog to document our fun times and horrible mistakes. So if someone took a picture of you dancing around a party with your top off (not me), they would have to send their roll of film away to be developed and hope that when the pictures came back, at least one would be in focus enough to be used as evidence. AND in order to share the guilty picture they would have to physically take that copy and show it around to one person at a time. Reaching everyone would be quite the task. If you wanted to share gossip the best way was to call a friend put them on hold and then conference a second friend so the 3 of you could talk.
Fast forward to 2013 and we now have tiny cell phones that have cameras, video, flash, microphones and all are connected to social media giving users the ability to share thoughts and images in an instant with hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends and strangers. How amazing to be witness to such advances in technology and social media.
Social media has become a platform for people to brag about their kids’ first goal in hockey. A place to tell people about the awesome party they’re at. A place to bitch about the weather. A place where people talk about where they’re going, who they’re with and what they’re eating.
However recently there has been a trend where people are social media shaming.
Social media shaming is when a person uses their audience of followers to call out another person for bad behaviour hoping to harness the power of peer pressure to shame the offender into changing their attitude.
A frustrated parent of a 12 year old boy with a habit of skipping school put the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child” into real life action. After creating a digital poster with pictures of the boy, the parents shared it online in order to spread the word that if anyone saw the boy outside school they should report it to the parents. Although this strategy may irritate the boy, it is obvious that the parents care about him.
Two high school boys in Arizona caught fighting were given a choice between suspension from school or hold hands during the lunch hour, in front of their fellow classmates for 15 minutes. Not wanting to be suspended, they chose holding hands as their punishment. And as typical teens with phones will do, they took pictures and posted them onto all their social media accounts. Do you think these boys learned that fighting is wrong?
A 22 year old woman (@someSKANKinMi) in Michigan decided to dress up for Halloween as a Boston Marathon bombing victim complete with running bib number and blood running down her legs. She posted a picture of herself on twitter. And then the social media shaming machine kicked into full force. Her tweet was shared. With every retweet the anger grew and the people of the twittersphere expressed their hatred for this woman and her insensitive choice of costume. They found a picture of her drivers license on her twitter (seriously people this is why you NEVER post personal stuff) and found out where she lives. They found out who her parents are and started calling them. The storm of tweets forced her to shut down all her social media accounts but that didn’t stop the mob mentality. The internet response even went so far as death threats to her and her family. Needless to say, she has since released an apology and as a result of the swift and severe backlash, she has also lost her job.
Has social media shaming turned into cyber-bullying?
It’s horrifying what the mob mentality is doing to this girl. Yes, she made a huge mistake and judging by her (now removed) nude shower tumblr video, this isn’t the first time she’s made bad choices, but people are threatening to kill her and her family! People are tweeting that they hope she meets a rapist. Come on that is over the top.
She’s lost her job and she is been publicly shamed on a level beyond comprehension. I think she will be sorry for this for the rest of her life. It will follow her for always. She will likely not get jobs because of the evidence on the internet for the rest of her life. Don’t get me wrong, I think what she did was wrong on so many levels and I’m all for twitter calling her out. Especially considering the people who know her IN REAL LIFE sure as hell didn’t when she talked about her costume idea or when she showed up at work wearing it. I want more public calling out for our leaders, politicians and businesses but when it leads to threats or violence, enough is enough.
How far does it have to go? Until she kills herself? Will the mob on the internet be happy then? Would it satisfy the internet to make them no better than her costume choice and no better than the bullies who pushed BC teen Amanda Todd to commit suicide from repeated and relentless abuse over social media for a mistake she made by being intimate with someone online. Those same voices are the ones who called for justice after Amanda Todd was found dead by hanging. The irony is deafening.
Yes, we are human. Yes, we all make bad decisions granted, not all of them are as epic as this one. But in the end, feelings were hurt and people were offended but no one was physically injured or killed by what she foolishly did. So why wish her death or bodily harm?
