Tonight while resting and watching TED talks I stumbled upon a talk "How one tweet can ruin your life" by Jon Ronson. Talk is about one sarcastic joke in Twitter by a women and how it turned her life upside down. I suggest you to really watch it. If only over your dead body then at least read the quotes from the talk below.
"Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each-other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in a way we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy."
"Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favour humans over ideology, and those people who favour ideology over humans. I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we are grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but now we are creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back being voiceless. Let's not do that."
"My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I am starting to think of that as a really nice option."
– Jon Ronson
I followed the Justine Sacco thing when it was happening, a bit surreal! It's mind-boggling how people didn't understand the jab at her own privilege. I guess it truly is a curse of short texts and social media, you really can't explain yourself every single time you post something. I bet people would still misunderstand your words! Nice post :)
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