Redeeming quality

On Monday, I was on LinkedIn, where a person who identifies himself as an author posted video of a stranger picking his nose on a subway train. I can think of no motive for doing something like this other than just shitty low-down meanness, but the so-called "author" claims that he wanted only to remind his fellow LinkedIn-ers that managing one's "brand" is a 24/7/365 endeavor, and that one can never be too careful in public, because someone is always watching, including jerks with cameras.

Let's set aside the remote possibility that this man wants to be known for his disgusting personal habits, and that public nose excavation would then be an integral aspect of his brand. Is there no other way to make your stupid and shallow little if-it-isn't-marketed-then-it-doesn't-exist point than to humiliate and degrade a person on the Internet? And it gets worse, because the post got a ton of attention. And according to my unscientific data analysis, reaction ran about 20% disgusted by the original poster's meanness and cruelty, and about 75% either neutral or amused. The remaining 5% of commenters actually took the poster at his word, and accepted his claim that the video was a public service announcement, meant only to illustrate the importance of brand management. Of course those people are stupid, and there's nothing you can do about stupid people.

*****

I won't pretend that I don't like social media. I do. I like staying in touch with family and friends whom I don't get to see often. I like posting pictures and writing funny captions and hashtags. (My hashtags are hilarious.) I like commenting and sharing and chatting.

But people are meant to be together, physically together. We're meant to see each other's faces and hear each other's voices. We're meant to connect, and not just electronically.

The loss of face-to-face interaction between people who are perfectly capable of meeting in person but who choose to engage with devices instead is a big problem, but it's not the only problem with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all of the rest of it. It's not even the biggest problem. Because of its remote and (sometimes) anonymous nature, social media has completely moved the line that people aren't supposed to cross. And the result is that in a pretty robust online debate on whether or not a person should have posted video of a stranger picking his nose, not one participant in that debate--not even among the right-thinking 20%--questioned the morality of secretly photographing a stranger in the first place.

*****

On Wednesday night, I checked in on Facebook. A neighborhood friend, who is confined to a wheelchair, posted a "feeling sad" status, and within moments a dozen people had posted "thinking of you" and "what can I do to help?" messages. Maybe it would have been better if we'd all rushed to her side. Her house is around the corner. But without Facebook, we probably wouldn't have known that she was sad and needed her friends.

Facebook has a lot of problems, but a thing that allows a lonely, disabled person to reach out and find immediate reassurance that there are people who love her and care about her can't be all bad. I saw my friend on Thursday night, and she was better. And that's what I'm sticking with. For every jackass who uses social media to bully and shame a harmless (gross, but harmless) stranger, there are ten good-hearted people who use it to cheer and comfort a person who's lonely or sick or sad. Social media is just like the people who created it. We suck sometimes, but we have our moments.