The vagaries of online news coverage and bad timing mean that it’s now possible for a private person to be the object of unrestrained global rage.
Because we live more of our lives online, and because it takes so little effort to magnify almost any event into its own moral drama, we are now awash in messages of unfiltered rage all over the internet. We accept that almost any combination of bad judgment and a video that documentsit can “go viral.” The vagaries of online news coverage and bad timing mean that it’s now possible for a private person to be despised and vilified around the world for making a bad decision. As with so many trending internet topics, a reasonable sense of proportionality is swept aside. Youtube consumers revel in videos of mostly nameless individuals captured at a moment of a serendipitous and sometimes cringe-inducing miscalculation. These “fails” are hard to ignore, feeding a primal need for the shock and awe stimulation of the unexpected. The smallest moments put us and millions of others in a loop we sometimes would have done well to have missed.
True, the idea of a local news event surfacing as a national obsession is not new. There are many accounts of stories even in the first half of the last century that became the preoccupation of American radio and newspaper consumers. Some of the best known were accounts of children who had fallen down wells or suddenly disappeared. Radio listeners tuned in by the hours to listen to breathless chronicles of rescuers trying to save Kathy Fiscus, who died before being reached in 1949. A happier conclusion with even more coverage occurred in Texas in 1987.
The difference with a viral story is that it is far easier to tap into the river of digital media originating from billions of internet users who contribute to the flow of potential viral content. Figure in the social variable of an event that arises from the apparent irresponsibility of one party, and the viral story takes on the outlines of a global morality play. The child-in-a-well stories today would probably focus equally on the neglectful homeowner who left lethal pieces of open ground in harm’s way.
We love the idea of culpability. It gives focus to some of our easily-stoked rage. And In some ways it’s become one of the least attractive features of our wired world.
This capability to link strangers who have viewed a single story into a community of outrage means that far too many of us are willing to save our energy to muster disgust for an event we do not fully understand involving individuals we do not know. As with our national political life, we seem to prefer pouring our free-floating anger into events over which we have no control, and with little more than indignation to offer.
We love the idea of culpability. It gives focus to some of our free floating rage. And In some ways it’s become one of the least attractive features of our wired world.
Such was the case with the deaths of two rare mammals well represented on YouTube: a gorilla in the Cincinnati Zoo and a well-known male lion in Zimbabwe. Both illustrate how low the flash point that will ignite cycles of hate can be. Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla were justifiably mourned after being shot by individuals: in the first case, by a Minnesota dentist with too much cash and too little common sense, as well as a pathetic need to bolster his ego by claiming another creature’s life. In the second instance, it was a parental miscue that resulted in a zoo official making shooting a gorilla to rescue a child who entered the primate’s domain.
World reaction to the dentist’s behavior forced him to close his practice and make himself scarce. Many of us took pleasure in his shame. The twist in the second instance was that the target was the mother, who momentarily took her eye off of her young son just long enough to miss his disappearance into the gorilla’s habitat. The woman received thousands of hate notes which found their way to her social media sites and e-mail, though authorities declined to call this anything more than an unfortunate accident. She probably behaved no differently than most parents with young children in constant motion.
This case is a reminder of the power of digital contagion completely swamps the logic of proportional reaction. Who knew that living in the global village would also mean being an involuntary witness to even the minor sins of other strangers? That clearly puts a lot of wear and tear on our psyches, especially if it means that we need to take on the alleged moral failings of even a tiny fraction of the estimated 3.2 billion wired inhabitants.
The ubiquitous conference call now routinely competes with other tasks: texting, cleaning out the inbox of our e-mail, checking online for some piece of ephemera, or counting the minutes until we can leave.
I have a good friend who flies a lot for work. He regularly commutes to the West Coast, Asia and Europe to meet with clients and other members of his firm. By all accounts, he’s very good at what he does. Even so, on those rare occasions when he momentarily alights in our part of the country, I find myself invariably asking him if he could save a lot of wear and tear by skyping or relying on the standard business tool of the conference call. He usually gives me a half-smile, once asking what I do when I’ve got time on my hands in a meeting that requires listening to disembodied voice through a box.
The truthful answer for me and probably most others huddled around a phone in a conference room is that we go into the human equivalent of a device’s airplane mode. We’re not really connecting. And most of us are probably not ready to play our “A” game. The person on the other end of the conversation is there but also not there. We hear them, but reacting to them is awkward. There is always a sense that the vital rhythms of listening and responding to the unseen person are irretrievably crippled. As my colleagues might say, there is no true synchronicity. Moreover, most of us are now so device-dependant that an extended conversation with the unseen is an open invitation to move on to other tasks: cleaning out the inbox of our e-mail, sending texts, or counting the minutes until we can leave.
Of course the price to pay for being in the same space is not always a picnic. Meeting face to face with an angry clients is taxing. And the logistics of flying long distance are now something to be endured. Crowds, connections and airline schedules have become mazes that can require more energy than the business reasons for the trip. Even so, my friend regularly endures a juggernaut of 8-hour flights and airport transfers to meet in person with clients and co-workers. He seems confident that he can bind those individuals to his agenda much more completely than would be the case if he relied on e-mails or conference calls.
Separated from those we want to reach, we begin to lose the incentive to transcend differences and work through difficult obstacles.
For all of the effort of being in the same space, what is gained? Any answer includes the obvious and the subtle. It’s clearly evident that we pick up a lot of meaning from body language, especially (but not only) the face. As has been said many times in these pages, eye contact matters. It gives us clues to the state of mind of the person we are trying to engage. Moreover, being within four feet of a person we want to influence means they will have an obligation for attention that is usually lost in distant connections. Attention adds energy to the exchange. Throw in the additional advantage of the obligation to actually listen, and the miasma of organizational sleepwalking that characterizes some conference calls can be defeated. My experience is that this ersatz format allows attention to fall to perhaps just one-half of what it could be. Separated from our interlocutor, we begin to lose the incentive to work through difficult obstacles.
Skype or some version of it is an improvement. And there is every reason to celebrate the family and personal connections it can help maintain. But in organizations where personal appearance and presentational skills count much more, making an impression at a distance is difficult.
In addition, knowing that oneself is on camera carries its own distractions. Self-presentation to a camera is restricting and unnatural. It’s more or less like holding up a mirror to ourselves as we speak. And most of us will do better not studying ourselves while we try to brainstorm ways to save the world.
