When you spend a lot of time talking to someone in the real world, you learn their intonations and their particular verbal peculiarities and physical tics. The way they communicate becomes a large part of how you view them as a person. Are they boisterous and loud? Are they quiet and do they stutter? You also learn a lot by what they choose to say. Are they selfish? Are they kind? Are they intelligent?
Social media has handed us all microphones, and we have started to listen to each other as much as to any “master's voice.” It is therefore increasingly critical to think about what we say, and what our words say about us.
Tallulah Habib, Social media activist
When you spend a lot of time talking to someone online, it's no different. Even though, in most cases, you cannot see the person, people behave differently from one another, and we judge them according to this behaviour.
A former FHM model, Jessica Leandra dos Santos, made what she refers to as an angry slip of the tongue on Thursday night by dropping the 'k-bomb' on her unsuspecting Twitter feed. A man at a supermarket made some sexist remark to her; her response was to call him a “kaffir” on Twitter. Naturally, this caused an absolute storm of outrage in the South African Twittersphere. Her apology, when it came, seemed to miss the point. She apologised for using bad language in anger and tried to spin the situation to be about feminism and women standing up for their rights.
Yes, people use a few choice phrases when they act in anger. But to many people, the choice phrase is not a racial slur. It seemed to come as a wake-up call to Dos Santos (who is now apparently going for communication training), but what we say and how we say it counts as much on the Internet as it does in real life - perhaps even more so.
In our physical spaces, we interact with a relatively small number of people. Unless we are celebrities, in general, our influence is small. On the Internet, however, everyone has a public voice. Social media has handed us all microphones, and we have started to listen to each other as much as to any “master's voice”. It is therefore increasingly critical to think about what we say, and about what we say says about us.
The Dos Santos example is an extreme one. Not everyone is likely to spout racism if they're off their guard. However, there are many little ways that people seem to drop the ball when it comes to communicating in online spaces.
I find it ironic, for example, that we'll spend hours reading up on how to win followers and influence fans, yet won't bother to learn that “a lot" is two separate words, or that “their” and “they're” are not interchangeable. I mean, come on, don't they still teach that stuff in primary school? If I can't be bothered to learn whether I like “quiet” crowds or “quite” like crowds, how can my followers trust that I know what I'm talking about when I give them interesting links to read, or worse, represent a brand? You wouldn't walk into a business meeting with mushed-up hair and mismatched socks - at least, one would hope not. So why represent yourself online as careless and lazy? One of my favourite quotes - from The Social Network - that I have brought up in many columns before, applies: ”The Internet is not written in pencil, it's written in ink.” As are the grammatical errors. If you use “who” instead of “whom” in a real-world conversation, it will be forgotten the next day, if not in the next 10 minutes. Use it in a tweet, and it will haunt you for years to come. So why are we more nonchalant about our tweets than our spoken words?
It's a case of content, too. If you would not say something to a room of complete strangers, why broadcast it online? You had a great breakfast, we're happy for you. You hate traffic, join the (literal) queue. You would not approach a stranger in the mall to tell them how sad you are, so why announce it to the world online?
The answer, I think, is that we can't see the crowds. They're distant, somewhere out there in the void. We imagine a room of our closest friends, some of whom might actually be reading our social media streams. We imagine that our words are framed by their knowledge of us, knowledge gained from years of knowing our real-life eccentricities and flaws. We imagine people who know us already, who have judged us and decided they like us and appreciate us for who we are. No doubt Dos Santos was imagining her own personal circles, who would not mind her ideas that a creepy man who happened to be black must be called a “kaffir” for his sins. No doubt she believed her imagined audience would be sympathetic, because she was angry and not thinking about her words wisely. Well, we've all seen how that worked out for her.
Now if Dos Santos' angry tweet makes her the South African poster girl for racism overnight, is it not worth asking what SMS speak and TMI (“too much (personal) information”) statements can do to any person's reputation online? True, there's not going to be an outcry if you misplace an apostrophe, but what kind of impression does it make?
In an age where employers Google search job applicants before they even consider whether they'll invite them for an interview, perhaps it's become necessary to consider this. The Internet is a public place, and you have an amazing amount of control over how you appear in that space. It might be worthwhile taking the extra time to think before you tweet.
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