Social media creates, and it destroys

Christine Flowers

The other day, someone announced her impending death on Twitter. She posted that her most recent CT scan had revealed a terminal pathology, and that she was going into hospice. There were thousands of replies, from what I can assume are strangers, expressing sympathy, prayers and encouragement.

I do not know this person, and I don’t follow her. She popped up in my feed because her post was retweeted by someone I actually do follow. I can’t even confirm that what the woman wrote was true, and in a way, that’s not important.

What matters is that someone reached out to people she likely only knew from their profile pictures and political opinions to say goodbye. There was something both achingly sad, and profoundly beautiful about it. Because it was a rare moment of kindness in the noxious storm.

It’s very easy these days to say that social media is toxic, because that would be the truth. People act in ways they’d never do in real life, because it isn’t real life. They act like feral wolves, because they can. The Twitter police don’t carry guns, and their badges are imaginary.

In fact, social media is one big imaginary world, made up of those who appear to be made of flesh and blood, substantial and tangible, but who are in essence only facsimiles of human beings.

The woman who announced her death may or may not be real, may or may not be dying, may or may not be a woman. If all of the things that she says are true, I will send my prayers to God on her behalf. In fact, I will do it anyway, giving the benefit of the doubt to that random, suffering voice.

I suppose the real point of this column is the fact that we are way too wrapped up in things that do not matter, with the opinions expressed by strangers in public, and not enough with the things that do matter like jobs, failing schools, people being killed and maimed, women being enslaved in Afghanistan, and the fact that we have a really bad football team. That last one was partly to see if you’re awake, and partly to bring you back home to local news, the things that touch you in your zone and code.

This week, Jon Gruden’s life exploded because of some private email exchanges that he had between 2011 and 2018 with a colleague. The emails included comments that were objectively racist, sexist and homophobic, and it’s hard to figure out how to defend them. You really can’t. Gruden doesn’t.

But they were private conversations between two men, and they became public because of a wholly separate investigation into another individual suspected of wrongdoing. Gruden, who was not the target of that investigation, became the victim of what we’ve all seen over the past few years, something I call the Twitch Hunt. When the private comments became public, Gruden was essentially turned into a non-person. Matt Taibi had a great column where he described Gruden as becoming increasingly invisible, like a ghost evaporating into the fetid air. Gone, done, cancelled.

You can no longer use certain words, because the Twitter armies will hunt you down and take your soul hostage if you do. You can’t express certain dissonant views about vaccines and masks, or the Facebook Stasi will sniff you out and tag your posts with disclaimers, the social media equivalent of being placed in the public stocks.

And if you dared to use racist, sexist or homophobic language with a friend in the privacy of your email (which of course was never private) you will be sentenced by the Star Chamber years after you transgressed. The sentence will be social oblivion.

It’s all so ephemeral, and yet deadly. A person who might not be dying is mourned by thousands, because of a human desire to give comfort. A person who we will never meet, and who made some bad comments to someone else we will never meet, is neutralized. And none of it touches us, but we’re supposed to care.

Meanwhile, real life is happening, and we’re too busy looking at our phones to notice. But at least we can mark ourselves “Safe from Jon Gruden.”