And now for the second installment of: “I’m afraid for my future”

For this I turn to the recent events at the Discovery Chanel building in Washington DC.

As most of you know, a gunman entered the building, took some hostages, made some demands and ended up dead.

I’m not going to point out the stupidity of the hostage taker. This is obviously too easy. Hello fish in a barrel.

I want to talk about the lack of critical thinking on part of the twitter universe. Twitter was the first source of information and for the hours of the event, continued to be the main source of information – and not all of it was good. I’m not bashing social media. I heart social media. I’m making a living studying it. But what makes me nervous about social media, is the lack of checks and balances. Anyone can blog and anyone can tweet. There is also no standard of professional integrity that comes with it. We can, and we do, say whatever we want. Why? Because we can without consequence. When it comes to movie reviews, this isn’t a bad thing, but when it comes to the safety and liveilhood of others – this is dangerous.

It first broke on twitter that the gunman had a manifesto of sorts. CLICK HERE to read it in full. From this, we could all see just what this crazy person wanted.

This is my crude summary of his rant: 1) Procreation means increased pollution. Babies = bad. 2) Solve military mechanized war. 3)Immigration and anchor babies = pollution and bad. 4) Global warming = bad. 5) Darwin = good. 6) US economy = bad. 7) Solve homelessness and unemployment.

What held so much promise here, is that the Twitterverse would be able to access this information and better understand what was at root in the situation. Um, in some cases yes. But it quickly went down hill.

The first tweet I read that scared me was from someone called MrNoface. Like that wasn’t a clue. According to his tweets, the gunman was confirmed as being Canadian. He then followed it up by telling all Canadian’s to get out of the US.

Um, excuse me. Would a Canadian immigrant really advocate for the end of immigration? Would they call all immigrants filth? (For a refresher see above. Remember that this was all over the place for everyone to read.) If he had just stopped to think about it for a second, he would have realized the stupidity in his tweet. I took the opportunity to ask him these things and he admitted that his information was wrong, yet he never tweeted that, it was never corrected. And for the people who picked up on it, they spent the rest of the day thinking Canadians are crazed gunman. Awesome. The speed of twitter allows the user to say whatever they want, no thought, just 140 characters.

The next scary twitter moment came when someone from inside the Discovery Building used their phone to take a picture of a man holding a gun outside. They proceeded to tweet it out as a shot of the hostage taker. Within seconds it was all over the world. And again, no one stopped to think about this for a second. For the sake of argument, let’s run the scenario:

You’re in your office and you’ve been told to stay where you are because there is an emergency situation in the lobby. You decide to get out your phone to call loved ones and tell them it’s hitting the fan and you love them. Then, as you look outside you see a man, in street clothes, packing a sniper riffle and a radio. Yes, that must be the gunman, so you take a picture, tweet it and feel like you are the best, smartest and most greatest person in the world. Now you pat yourself on the back.

So now the twitterverse is retweeting this picture. This IS the gunman. This clearly seen man must be crazy and we have it on digital file. ReTweet ReTweet ReTweet.

Well, congratulations twitterverse, you’ve ruined his life.

If we run the scenario one more time, this time with some critical thinking, we can see just why, we ruined this man’s life.

So you’re in your office. You’re told to stay put because there is a dangerous situation happening in the lobby. You grab your phone to call your loved ones and tell them, your going to be here a while and you love them. As you look outside, you see a man in street clothes with a sniper riffle and a radio. You STOP, you THINK. If you’ve been notified that the situation is in progress, then most likely the gunman is ALREADY in the lobby and someone has ALREADY called the police. So MAYBE the man outside is, NOT the gunman but a SWAT team member there to save you from the crazy man ALREADY inside the building. So instead of taking his picture you stop and think, I’m lucky to be safely in the hands of the highly trained police, I should just sit down and stay calm. And if you’re really good at critical thinking you also quickly realize that a crazed gunman wouldn’t be approaching the building already packing a gun and radio when the police have already closed off the building and surrounding streets. I’m thinking a guy skulking around with a gun might have been apprehended long before he got close enough for you take that picture.

BUT, that’s not the scenario that played out. And now, this mans life is changed forever. I would imagine his job requires an amount of anonymity that you just stripped from him. Good work everyone. Eventually people retracted what was said. But as I scanned the feed I realized that you can’t un-ring the twitter bell. Good work twitter, way to put your head in the game.

There are some fantastic benefits to social media. It does some great things. But it also does harm. Harm by the hands of those who have the technology but not the critical thinking skills that go along with it’s proper use. And this, is the slippery slop that we’re on.

I’m afraid for the future.