By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Little by little we’re beginning to understand how social networking can improve our professional and personal lives and also how the misuse of social networking can hurt both personally and professionally. The love affair has matured. For some of us anyway.The life cycle of new media: it's an old story.
First comes the romance. We’re intoxicated. We’re infatuated with this new device. We’re totally amazed by what it can do. Everywhere we go we have to show off our new love and brag about its unprecedented, unparalleled good qualities. We neglect everything else to spend time with our new love. Above all, we are absolutely certain that our lives are about to be transformed—and always for the better, of course.
Stage two, the post honeymoon stage of any relationship, inevitably brings complications along with thoughts of the o-mi-god-what-have-I-got-myself-into sort. When it comes to social networking, these complications tend to arise from naive enthusiasm or from an unthinking conflation of the personal and the public/professional aspects of life.
Finally comes the mature stage for a new communications medium. There’s no more caché, no more glamor. If the innovation has any staying power, it has entered the useful tool stage, which shades into the ho-hum phase: one more niche occupant. And so life goes on, not exciting perhaps, but safe, and comfortable.
Facebook, texting, twitter: all of these wide-casting media have encouraged people to make dangerous assumptions with hurtful consequences. In the beginning, of course, was the phenomenon of the email send button. Who among us hasn’t had to apologize for the message that wasn’t supposed to be sent?
There’s a reason for these mis- and mal-communications, I think Using the web in general and social networking media in particular is supposed to be as natural as breathing, so natural we can emote anywhere anytime without cogitating or composing or censoring—and without consequences, except attracting an ego-gratifying audience and oodles of friends, all countable.
What red-blooded American doesn’t want to be popular?
And what American doesn’t like to rack up the numbers? Counting body bags. Counting friends. Either way, the more the better. How many people have friended you? How many people are reading your blog or your tweets? Stats, please.
The ease of on-line communications melds beautifully with the American tendency to value gut reaction over painstaking analysis. Impulse is genuine. Thinking first brings the risk of self-censorship and inauthenticity. So click! We’re hardly aware of what we’ve written, but it’s already out there.
So open! So regrettable! Which led to the first Facebook crisis. Suddenly prospective employers and college admissions officials were wondering if they wanted anything to do with the individual in the orgy pix with the party-party bio—which, let’s face it, wasn’t authentic so much as generic, since you wouldn’t attract the numbers if you didn’t seem hip or cool or sexy. In any event, a little self-censorship began to seem prudent. A little more regard for privacy, too. Maybe the world didn’t have to know everything.
The privacy issue also played a role in subsequent Facebook crises. Personal information was being used for commercial purposes. Well, duh! If you don’t want your info sold to the highest bidder, don’t put it out there. Because, guess what? The guys who run these sites aren’t doing it for the noble purpose of making friends for you. They’re doing it to make money for themselves.
Which brings us to that very touching notion: information wants to be free. Believe it or not, that sensibility cropped up in the pre-electronic era, too. Pirated editions of printed works are cheap—but how’s an author or a journalist to live without royalties or a salary? Hence copyright law. And here it's mea culpa. I can (and do) piggyback off the mainstream media, who have to pay their reporters and editorial staff. But where’s my info going to come from when the print press dies? Information won’t be free then. It will cease to exist.
There’s a lot of advertising on the web now, some of it very annoying, but there’s not enough to maintain stables of reportorial thoroughbreds. By going electronic, we can protect our forests and save on the cost of newsprint and printing presses. But we can’t afford to eliminate the cost of a news room. Preferably multiple competing news rooms, at that.
So worldly wisdom has replaced naive enthusiasm when it comes to representing ourselves on the world wide web and elsewhere. And most of our postings aren’t as clever and memorable and treasured as we’d like to think. Yet some contributions leap out as unique. New talent has evaded old gatekeepers to reveal itself on You Tube or Twitter or on a handful of the millions of blogs in existence. Here’s a thoroughly useful and creative form of self-exposure. You won’t be discovered if you don’t put yourself out there.
Thus, some professional lives are born on the new media. Yet other professional lives have been harmed or destroyed by users who forget how viral the electronic media can be. A reporter for CNN was discharged after tweeting in praise of a recently dead Lebanese Muslim cleric. It seems the cleric was vehemently anti-Israel and pro-Hamas. She hastened to elaborate: she admired only his modern approach to the role of women. But Twitter’s 140 characters don’t allow for explanation and contextualization. Nor had she given her little tweet the careful thought that would have informed her normal contributions to CNN. It might be argued that the tweet was just a personal message. In that case, she chose the wrong medium. Twitter wasn’t designed for dear diary purposes. She should have known that.
Some State Department techies sent on a mission to Damascus made the same mistake. They thought they could tweet their delight at finding a food shop selling smoothies in the Syrian capital. Pretty soon the whole world knew of a State Department delegation in Damascus. The problem here? It was supposed to be an unpublicized visit. Oh-0h!
There’s another problem with these guys. Why weren’t they reporting on their encounters with Syrian street food—or with Syrian cuisine, which is some of the best in the Arab world? Effective diplomats go out of their way to become acquainted with the cultures within which they must operate. These were only techies, you say? So what did I expect? Simple. If my tax dollars are paying their salaries and their travel costs, I expect them to represent the U.S. at a reasonably sophisticated level while they’re on tour. I certainly don’t expect them to be sending clueless boorish messages through non-confidential channels. I expect them to be impressing their hosts by showing an interest in local culture.
Hopefully this incident will inspire the State Department to train all its employees (and its multitudinous contract workers at all levels) in the proper use and non-abuse of the electronic media while representing the U.S. abroad. This has nothing to do with curtailing freedom of speech. Diplomats, like reporters—and generals, have their private opinions. But the price they pay for having such weighty jobs is keeping their opinions to themselves in many situations.
Fortunately, the State Department has incorporated the new media into its communications strategy. Unfortunately, some of its enthusiasts don’t distinguish, in their effusions, between the personal and the professional. When an Ambassador tweets, he’s not really expressing himself. The substance of his remarks, however brief, however apparently informal, must be consistent with what he's saying via other vocabularies on other media. Ditto with officially-generated blogs. However attractive a blog’s design, however relaxed its language, the message has a single purpose: to represent the interests of the U.S.
The need for protecting users’ privacy, the need for users to exercise more than a modicum of discretion, the absolute necessity to make a distinction between the personal and professional—these lessons have probably taken a little of the fun out of the new media. That’s the way it is with new toys, which isn’t to say that most of us are ready to do without them now that we have them.
The ease of on-line communications melds beautifully with the American tendency to value gut reaction over painstaking analysis. Impulse is genuine. Thinking first brings the risk of self-censorship and inauthenticity. So click! We’re hardly aware of what we’ve written, but it’s already out there.
So open! So regrettable! Which led to the first Facebook crisis. Suddenly prospective employers and college admissions officials were wondering if they wanted anything to do with the individual in the orgy pix with the party-party bio—which, let’s face it, wasn’t authentic so much as generic, since you wouldn’t attract the numbers if you didn’t seem hip or cool or sexy. In any event, a little self-censorship began to seem prudent. A little more regard for privacy, too. Maybe the world didn’t have to know everything.
The privacy issue also played a role in subsequent Facebook crises. Personal information was being used for commercial purposes. Well, duh! If you don’t want your info sold to the highest bidder, don’t put it out there. Because, guess what? The guys who run these sites aren’t doing it for the noble purpose of making friends for you. They’re doing it to make money for themselves.
Which brings us to that very touching notion: information wants to be free. Believe it or not, that sensibility cropped up in the pre-electronic era, too. Pirated editions of printed works are cheap—but how’s an author or a journalist to live without royalties or a salary? Hence copyright law. And here it's mea culpa. I can (and do) piggyback off the mainstream media, who have to pay their reporters and editorial staff. But where’s my info going to come from when the print press dies? Information won’t be free then. It will cease to exist.
There’s a lot of advertising on the web now, some of it very annoying, but there’s not enough to maintain stables of reportorial thoroughbreds. By going electronic, we can protect our forests and save on the cost of newsprint and printing presses. But we can’t afford to eliminate the cost of a news room. Preferably multiple competing news rooms, at that.
So worldly wisdom has replaced naive enthusiasm when it comes to representing ourselves on the world wide web and elsewhere. And most of our postings aren’t as clever and memorable and treasured as we’d like to think. Yet some contributions leap out as unique. New talent has evaded old gatekeepers to reveal itself on You Tube or Twitter or on a handful of the millions of blogs in existence. Here’s a thoroughly useful and creative form of self-exposure. You won’t be discovered if you don’t put yourself out there.
Thus, some professional lives are born on the new media. Yet other professional lives have been harmed or destroyed by users who forget how viral the electronic media can be. A reporter for CNN was discharged after tweeting in praise of a recently dead Lebanese Muslim cleric. It seems the cleric was vehemently anti-Israel and pro-Hamas. She hastened to elaborate: she admired only his modern approach to the role of women. But Twitter’s 140 characters don’t allow for explanation and contextualization. Nor had she given her little tweet the careful thought that would have informed her normal contributions to CNN. It might be argued that the tweet was just a personal message. In that case, she chose the wrong medium. Twitter wasn’t designed for dear diary purposes. She should have known that.
Some State Department techies sent on a mission to Damascus made the same mistake. They thought they could tweet their delight at finding a food shop selling smoothies in the Syrian capital. Pretty soon the whole world knew of a State Department delegation in Damascus. The problem here? It was supposed to be an unpublicized visit. Oh-0h!
There’s another problem with these guys. Why weren’t they reporting on their encounters with Syrian street food—or with Syrian cuisine, which is some of the best in the Arab world? Effective diplomats go out of their way to become acquainted with the cultures within which they must operate. These were only techies, you say? So what did I expect? Simple. If my tax dollars are paying their salaries and their travel costs, I expect them to represent the U.S. at a reasonably sophisticated level while they’re on tour. I certainly don’t expect them to be sending clueless boorish messages through non-confidential channels. I expect them to be impressing their hosts by showing an interest in local culture.
Hopefully this incident will inspire the State Department to train all its employees (and its multitudinous contract workers at all levels) in the proper use and non-abuse of the electronic media while representing the U.S. abroad. This has nothing to do with curtailing freedom of speech. Diplomats, like reporters—and generals, have their private opinions. But the price they pay for having such weighty jobs is keeping their opinions to themselves in many situations.
Fortunately, the State Department has incorporated the new media into its communications strategy. Unfortunately, some of its enthusiasts don’t distinguish, in their effusions, between the personal and the professional. When an Ambassador tweets, he’s not really expressing himself. The substance of his remarks, however brief, however apparently informal, must be consistent with what he's saying via other vocabularies on other media. Ditto with officially-generated blogs. However attractive a blog’s design, however relaxed its language, the message has a single purpose: to represent the interests of the U.S.
The need for protecting users’ privacy, the need for users to exercise more than a modicum of discretion, the absolute necessity to make a distinction between the personal and professional—these lessons have probably taken a little of the fun out of the new media. That’s the way it is with new toys, which isn’t to say that most of us are ready to do without them now that we have them.