Daily Post 1555
SOCIAL MEDIA BATTLEGROUND
Starting with one to one affair for family and friends, social media has been completely transformed into a battleground. From love, affection and bonhomie to outright venom all over, has been the transformation. Sushant Singh Rajput case in the recent times has put in the open, as to what the social media is capable of. The electronic media now plays a second fiddle. The venom passes over to the electronic media and over a period of time, media has become the venom ecosystem. The present mental state that majority of us carry is to spill the beans on the social media; good, bad and ugly and keep defending it till the time cows come home.
The days of discussion, deliberation and finding solutions to interpersonal issues or even amongst stakeholders, within agencies with equanimity, peace, logic, reason and perseverance seems to be getting over. When you have not interacted with people in normal times, not understood either that system or the person or the ecosystem, the only you can get your noise heard is through the social media. What a battle with no rules, no processes, no binding conduct, no check on the language, rabble rousing et al, seems we have gone even beyond the beginning of civilisation. A verbal dual or textual diatribe or obscene altercation cannot give any reckoning, respect or mileage to anybody.
You can certainly feel differently. And that is precisely the reason you are there. When official conduct is brought to the social media, it can only be called disgraceful. Official propriety is the sine qua non of our existence. All professionals and organisations sticking to it, provides the overall sanity to the system. These days even protests are being handled by social media. Scrutiny in professional life, the official way is the only way of functioning, is the lesson which hundreds of years of organisational existence has taught us. Unlearning that and getting into an unauthenticated and unchartered system seems to have already become our nemesis.
Social media today has become a battlefield of every type. President Trump used Twitter as an important weapon in his arsenal. Digital strategy is worked out for lots of social media birds. It costs time, money and energy. Videos and pics are the main weapons. Multimedia is the form. It plays on hearts and minds of people. Content, utility and purpose we seem to have lost. In the social media battle nobody wins and nobody loses, because it cannot be decided there. Bitterness and bad blood are the only winners. You might feel you have gained, actually the final decision can be made only in hindsight, whether it has actually happened that way. Or you have given up everything; professional and personal for a few claps.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS A NEMESIS EXPERT, TRANSITORY FEELING CAN BE EUPHORIC.
Sanjay Sahay