The Pros and Cons of Social Media Part I

So, let’s see, social media has the power to uplift, educate, and inspire or to tear down, mislead, and even desensitize people and question humanity.  The cons and many exist as I have conversations often with people about the beauty that is social media because of our immediate ability as people to connect with so many people instantaneously by a simply pressing of a button.

 

Worldviews are altered, a paradigm shift occurs in just moments, I’m sure many people especial comic book junkies recall the famous line in the Spider Man movie, “With great POWER, comes great RESPONSIBILITY”, social media is an amazing tool when people use great care and responsibility to teach, awaken, inspire, and advocate for transparency, learning, and accountability by using social media to achieve these goals.   

The dark-side however, is when social media doesn’t get used in a responsible way, my heart was heavy when I read about teenagers who from a very desensitized and lack of humanity construct allowed another human being to drown because humanity, care and concern were lost.  People many times immediately blame “home-training” or assume often incorrectly that there is a lack thereof in respect to how some people were raised as an automatic indictment against parenting skills when human beings think or behave in a manner which is inconsistent with “performative social norms”.

 

I say performative, because as a society the truth is, outrage often (and that may very well be what’s shown) but outrage tends to be “performative in scope” depending upon who a perpetrator is and who society deems a victim.  “Performative outrage” isn’t real, but the actors wear their masks well and feign concern but for a moment and that does not necessarily fall squarely on parenting skills or even a lack thereof, it falls many times on the realities of the social constructs for which that which should be humanity fails to authenticate except when bad things happen.

The teenagers who lacked compassion for another human being are in some sense extras in a world for which so many of us have created and emboldened because lack of humanity has become the new normal and our young people are watching, learning, absorbing, and emulating the lack of compassions seen, experienced, and promoted creating a new worldview from a very jaded lens called agents of socialization and it’s not getting better, it is getting worse.