Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (18 page)

I paused for a moment, thinking back to the two vastly different experiences.

“At the Democratic National Convention we were like rock stars. Everyone wanted to meet with us,” I said. “At the Republican National Convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days. No one would meet with us. I was begging people to meet with us.”

A blogger recorded that statement and uploaded it to the Internet. A few days later—in the comments section on YouTube—Matt Burns, the RNC’s communications director responded. “With all due respect, Randi Zuckerberg is totally full of sh*t on this one,” he said, before accusing me of liberal bias.

None of this might have been a big deal had it not been picked up by blogs, one of which ran the headline “Randi Zuckerberg is Totally Full of Shit.” I won’t list the comments that appeared in these stories, but suffice it to say, they focused on my weight, appearance, and all sorts of alleged personal and character defects. After I saw this outburst of aggression and viciousness, I was so upset that I cried for a while in front of my computer. I wondered how I could show my face at work the next day, or whether I would even have a job to go back to.

In the end, the ruckus received only a passing mention at work. The storm passed, and I didn’t get fired. Most people were actually very supportive, and I learned some important lessons from that moment.

For starters, the Internet may be the world’s new watercooler, but it’s also the world’s most efficient, perpetual outrage machine. It’s entirely possible that something you do or say, even if trivial or completely innocuous, can set that machine off.

The
New York Times
motto is “All the news that’s fit to print.” If the Internet had a motto, it might be “F*** it. Write whatever you want.” Anything that might generate clicks is fair game to be posted, whether or not it’s truthful or accurate. Personal insults traded between people online are quality “click bait,” moments of outrage built up by writers and bloggers purely as a way of generating more article views. This is a model of “journalism” that has evolved over the last few years as part of the monetization strategy of all the usual tabloid suspects.

For example, earlier this year when I announced that I was writing a book, one blog posted a short article discussing the news. The article was snarky and clearly designed to feed the trolls, who responded with gusto. Here are just a few of the comments that followed the article:

“I have nothing to hear from this woman.”

“Who the s*** cares about Randi (Jesus, what a name) Zuckerberg?”

“If my Facebook-addicted sister reads this book, I will murder her and her entire family.”

Nice. But even if none of this abuse remotely fazes me anymore or affects the work I’m doing, the outrage machine has plenty of ability to destroy careers and reputations.

Google the words “Internet” and “fired,” and you’ll come up with an endless list of people who have had their employment-related gaffes put through the ringer of the Internet-forwarding machine. There are untold numbers of people with video résumés, employment-seeking letters, stories of misbehavior at major corporations and law firms—anything and everything has, at some point, made it to the rounds of the forwarded.

In 2012, Gene Morphis was the chief financial officer of Francesca’s Holdings Corporation. He maintained a personal blog and Twitter account, and like any good Internet citizen, liked to post about his life, including things of interest to his company, such as “Dinner w/Board tonite. Used to be fun. Now one must be on guard every second” and “Board meeting. Good numbers = Happy Board.” His company began to take an interest in his online life. The tweeting CFO continued, “Earnings released. Conference call completed. How do you like me now, Mr. Shorty?”

As it happens, Mr. Shorty apparently didn’t like him tweeting information that could affect the stock price of his publicly traded company. Morphis was fired.

Why do people, even in senior positions and with plenty of experience, make such dumb mistakes with social media? The Internet seduces us to share our most intimate, private, and crazy thoughts, because it’s so incredibly easy and because it sometimes makes us forget we’re communicating and interacting with actual people. When all you’re doing is talking to a computer, that requires a lot less work than looking someone in the eye and saying the same thing to that person’s face—and a lot less nerve.

The answer to this, as I’ve discussed throughout this book, is all about being true to who we really are, both online and off.

Certainly in the pre-Internet world, there was a lot of face-to-face human cruelty that didn’t require a computer screen to rob people of their shared sense of humanity. There always were and always will be some bullies on the playground, mean bosses at work, vocal critics, and just plain jerks. But when so many of our personal interactions play out via faceless interchanges with a global reach, the temptation to hurt and the potential to be hurt are exponential.

Keep this in mind when posting online reviews of businesses. The rise of social media means that companies are far more accessible to us, as consumers, than they have been previously. There was a time when, if a server at a restaurant treated you poorly, the best you could do was complain to the manager. If you were extremely influential, perhaps there was a slim shot your opinion about a restaurant would appear in a newspaper or as a snappy “three-word summary” in a Zagat guide. Now, a single tweet about a single bad moment can set off a tweeting avalanche that won’t abate for days and days. If a single server doesn’t meet your expectations, you can go straight to the Internet and influence the perceptions of thousands through Yelp.

At any given moment, my Twitter feed usually contains at least one person complaining about a travel delay or bad customer service. (Damn you, Delta, how could you do this to me? Don’t you know who I AM?! I have a really high Klout score!) One of my all-time favorite viral YouTube videos is “United Breaks Guitars,” in which a passenger sings about United Airlines breaking his guitar during one of its flights. As I mentioned earlier in the book, both positive and negative feedback travels faster and farther than ever before. Which means that the average Joe can now have the same impact on a business as a professional reviewer can.

This is a tremendous amount of power for consumers to have. For the first time, customers and clients have the ability to render their verdicts on
us
in the public sphere, and our reputations depend on impressing a far wider audience than just the boss. As discussed earlier, with the posts our friends put on our walls, our authentic identities aren’t merely what we curate; they also consist in large part of what others say about us. The moral here is, to the best of your ability, be nice to the people you meet since, in effect, there is a kind of performance review that takes place in real time every day online.

And keep in mind that just because you have the megaphone doesn’t mean you always have to be shouting into it. If someone does something to offend you, be careful of going straight to the Internet. Your response should be in proportion to whatever went wrong in the first place.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about the trend of social media “shaming” and how it’s gotten wildly out of hand. In March 2013, at a Python programming language developer’s conference in Santa Clara, California, a woman overheard some men behind her making off-color jokes about dongles, which are a kind of laptop cord. They also joked about “forking” someone’s code. What happened next illustrates how quickly things can escalate online. Instead of confronting the dongle jokers directly, she made an example of them by snapping a photo of them and calling them out on Twitter for being inappropriate. A few thousand retweets later, and the dongle jokers were fired. Then, news of that firing hit the Internet, kicked up the outrage machine, and she found herself fired too.

That’s the world we live in. One tweet, one photo, one blog post is now all it takes for people to lose their jobs, their reputations, and their credibility.

Another case is that of Lindsey Stone, a girl who, as a joke, took a photo of herself holding up a middle finger inside Arlington National Cemetery, and she posted it on her personal Facebook page. Bad taste? Yes. Worth losing her job over? Unclear. However, an angry group launched a “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page, started a Change.org petition, and harassed her employer publicly until her employer let her go.

So, what’s the takeaway? If you see people doing something you don’t like, and you talk to them privately about it, you’re giving them time to think about what they did and change their behavior the next time. But when you immediately take their behavior public, you’ve summoned the Internet hordes, and there’s no telling when or where they’ll stop. Empathy—that essential aspect of face-to-face interaction—seems to be especially absent when it comes to online mobs.

There’s no doubt that it’s uncomfortable and awkward to confront someone. It’s much easier to just point, click, and share than it is to actually deal with speaking to another human directly. But wouldn’t you want a person to talk to you before posting, if the situation were reversed?

When you shame-post someone, it can have serious effects on that person’s life. A friend of mine recently found out just how far her voice would carry online when she rage-tweeted on the UPS Twitter account that she didn’t get the package she was expecting, even though she was home, because the delivery guy didn’t ring her doorbell. Not long after this tweet, the same delivery guy showed up at her door again, deeply apologetic for his failure to ring the doorbell. As she later posted on Facebook, “I didn’t know it would trickle down to the poor guy that delivers all our stuff.
Ugh
. I need a little perspective sometimes—feeling sorry.”

Most of us have been guilty of this in the past. I admit that I’ve overreacted and called people out for things on Twitter instead of telling them how I felt directly, and I sometimes pretend to be taking pictures of something when what I’m really doing is trying to get a picture of something else funny right behind it that I can post online. But recently I’ve been thinking and reflecting on my own behavior. It hurts to be mocked, whether online or offline, and if you wouldn’t want it done to you, don’t do it to others. Just because there’s only a slim chance the person will ever find out, that doesn’t mean you’re not being a bully.

Maybe in a world where everyone is a critic we all just need to toughen up a bit and grow thicker skin. But I feel that’s not quite the answer either. What we need are better unspoken social rules and etiquette around this sort of thing. Just because we all have the functional equivalent of a printing press at our fingertips, and in our pockets, that doesn’t mean we need to use these devices to settle scores.

With great power, according to the eminent philosopher Spider-Man (and Voltaire, of course), comes great responsibility. We cannot expect the Internet to solve all our personal problems, nor, given the exponential power of our voices online, should we turn to the Internet unless necessary. When you choose to publicly shame someone on social media, it’s as if you’re telling that person that you don’t think they’re worthy of a second chance. Most people deserve a second chance. So, we need to choose when to use the megaphone, when to address our problems directly with the people with whom we have issues, and when to just let it all go.