The awesome power we hold
A connected world has given all of us the ability to touch more lives than ever before but are we mature enough to be given such a burden?
“With great power there must also come…great responsibility” - Ben Parker Amazing Fantasy #15 August 1962.
Strictly speaking, the quote is attributed to Voltaire, a French man in the 19th Century but I doubt many of us even know who he is. I certainly don’t and besides, I’m more comfortable quoting Spidey comics. It may sound clichéd but I think the saying has never been more relevant to Malaysians than it was during the run up to GE13 and on the morning of 6th May 2013.
I’m not going to talk about the results, because there have been and will be billions of words dedicated to dissecting, analysing and postulating about events leading up to, during and after GE13 but I would like to discuss the role social media played in it and will continue to play in the forming of society in the future.
Simply put, with the power of the Internet and a multitude of channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WeChat and Google+ combined with camera enabled digital devices and cheap broad band, we are now capable of touching the lives of potentially millions of people. That’s an incredible amount of influence to have and with it comes all the advantages and pitfalls of giving us free reign.
At its core, social media was supposed to be all about sharing those interesting bits and moments of our lives with our friends and family. It allowed me to connect to friends I hadn’t spoken to since I was in short pants and also made it easier to organise events and family gatherings without having to send phone messages to dozens of different people.
Of course, it wasn’t long before we discovered the sheer connectability of social media also made it the biggest soapbox ever conceived. Who needs to stand in a corner of Hyde Park with a loud hailer in the freezing cold when they can reach more people with 100 per cent clarity by using a keyboard and clicking ‘send’? Forget fiddling around with files and folders to get your point across because now we can share crystal clear images, audio files and HD videos for free. The free flow of information is literally overwhelming, yet we’re also addicted to it to the point where most of us stay logged on to our social media accounts every second of every day.
While I may sound like a doomsday fatalist with a fear of progress, I think the biggest asset in any future campaign - be it to publicise a charity, to launch a product, to find a missing child or to start a war, will be information and specifically how accurate it is and how quickly it can be disseminated. Write a brilliant press release with all the details every body needs and you can expect to get excellent results or participation in your event. Do a piss poor job of it and you’ll get lost in the digital morass.
Let’s not be naïve though because there are experts who exploit social media everyday. Being a social media pro is a proper job these days as you get paid quite handsomely if you know what target markets react to and how to best exploit it for your clients. There in lies the issue of responsibility.
Due to the sheer connectivity of social media and the speed of broadband connections, it’s possible to get something across to potentially millions of people in tenths of a second. Not only that, but because it’s a two-way communication channel, the timing of responses is limited to how fast a person can type. Again, this is one of the best things about it but it also means there is a big opportunity to be exploited by anyone with an agenda.
To take on a darker tone, imagine if you will rivals intent on getting ahead by discrediting each other. It’s not hard to imagine a targeted campaign filled with faked photos, videos and even comments designed to do anything they want. It could be to create distrust or perhaps rally the public against a rival or even push the target audience to act out with violence.
Regardless of the aims, all it takes is a planned and strategic manner in disseminating the information and before you know it people who have nothing to do with the origination of the message are already passing it off through their circle of influence and championing it. Sure, it sounds simplistic but you can’t deny it happens every day for a variety of different reasons.
The beauty about social media is it’s a self regulating community as nonsense, BS and plain trolling is dealt with swiftly by the weight of such large audiences that can neutralise the original message, but it also assumes a level of maturity and the ability for the target audience to filter out what is real, what is made up and what has been put up by people with agendas.
Because you can’t censor the Internet and the information on it, consumers have a responsibility to filter what they share with their contacts. Blindly sharing out and agreeing to something we have seen because it was posted by a popular figure doesn’t make it true but it does have a domino effect on the people we share it with. You don’t need to be an investigative reporter to tell the difference and most of the time, sharing things blindly is harmless but a mature audience and society also thinks and analyses the information it gets thereby ensuring it doesn’t behave like a flock of sheep.
Ultimately, we’ve only scratched the potential social media has and the future will hold yet more ways we can share parts our lives with the rest of the world but we should remember before we go even further up the sharing chute, we need to follow a code of conduct and act responsibly online. Like Peter Parker knows only too well, his great powers come with a burden of using them responsibly and it’s exactly the same for us.