With social media we’re all an open book, even when it’s us manipulating the storyline, presenting ourselves as a character the way we want to be perceived as heroes or villains, clowns or cads.
Usually that’s where the frivolity of social media ends and the damaging problems of the medium’s permanency begin. Sometimes we just do and say stupid things, because there are no filters attached to social media; its lightning speed and raw nature are part of the attraction.
Ask Roland Martin, who probably isn’t laughing today like he was on Super Bowl Sunday as he clumsily hammed it up with his Twitter play-by-play coverage of what others are calling his homophobia.
Martin, a CNN commentator and political analyst, was suspended from his job Wednesday for a couple of his many Sunday tweets that included his suggestion that if a “dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”
Gay and lesbian rights organizations are asking for Martin’s head for perceived homophobia and advocating violence against homosexuals. That’s a valid perception, but one I doubt was Martin’s intent. Rather, he was a twit tweeting things he thought would be funny.
Christine Rubino went through the same thing recently. A fifth-grade teacher in Brooklyn, she was suspended, too, when she called her students “devil spawn” who should be drowned in her Facebook page status update.
Frankly, I find the humor in both of these situations. It feels like something I would do, and have probably done but don’t remember. I’m as guilty of offensive, potty-mouthed humor as the next deviant … within reason.
There’s always a limit … because you can’t take it back. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, catalogued somewhere by Google, being filed away in the deep, seemingly infinite recesses of the Internet, as if the Internet is some room somewhere with an ever-expanding capacity for the storage of all our digital faux pas.
Martin’s and Rubino’s actions were inappropriate, especially when they are figures who help shape opinion — Martin on television, Rubino in the classroom.
More important, though, they’re the victims of their own hubris in assuming they were operating in a vacuum, that the medium and method by which they expressed these flippant and funny musings was an environment they could control. Controlling the message itself is possible; controlling the distance it travels is not.
Unfortunately, they are also the victims of the same political correctness that seemed to govern every public utterance on television and in print since the 1990s. It hasn’t died, it just found a newer, faster, more effective home with social media and the Internet.
There are hundreds of stories like these all over the country, a sign of times of the mental diarrhea with which we are afflicted. You really have to know when enough is enough, because Big Brother is watching.
An off-color joke between friends over a beer at a bar can be forgotten, probably before the end of the hour. Tweet it, and it can be used to fire you, or to stop you from ever getting that coveted job in the first place, becoming a permanent part of the digital record.
It’s 21st-century cyberspying, and the reason businesses like SocioClean, for one, now exist. SocioClean is a niche business that rates your online activity and evaluates your “personal brand.”
Roland Martin might want to buy some stock in that company. I hear it’s doing big business thanks to guys like him who haven’t learned to think before they tweet.
