An absolute MUST READ from TechCrunch.com for anyone who even casually uses social media:
NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth
by Paul Carr on November 7, 2009 [Excerpt]
I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.
Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.
Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.
I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country. How do you even begin to process the idea of an American soldier shouting the takbir, before mowing down his comrades in arms? On American soil? At the home base of the Combat Warrior Stress Reset program? Yes, that’s definitely one for the experts to parse.
And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.
[SZ: Please follow link to continue this important piece from Paul Carr. Yes, even if you are someone who rarely "clicks through" - it's THAT important.]
Social media is an evolving technology that we are adopting at a staggering pace. In many ways it opens the world to us and connects us with people we would not otherwise ever come to know, or contribute to our personal growth, even if it is only in some small measure.
Social media can keep us informed. It can entertain us. It can expand our personal horizons and potentials.
It can also be terribly destructive, harmful, and hurtful. I say that as someone who loves social media, as someone who considers herself a “citizen journalist” [via PandemicChronicle.com].
Another snippet from Paul Carr:
And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment
, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.
The Stanford Prison Experiment he mentions and links to is also worth the time to read. I read it afresh, along with Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil because of my pandemic advocacy [of all things]. Carr’s reference was anything but casual or capricious.
So go read already….
