I Love Social Media, But It Comes With Extreme Danger
Posted
Chris Plack, Lake City Radio-
I love social media. For over a decade now, as someone that specializes in digital marketing professionally, social media has been responsible for keeping my lights on, my fridge full, and a roof over my head. Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or Friendster, social media has played not only a large roll in my professional life, but it’s also responsible for reacquainting me with a certain pen pal from Warsaw I met back in 1994 that I’m happy to say is now my bride of five years. All in all, I love me some social media. But social media often comes with extreme dangers. I don’t mean the billions of dollars in productivity lost every year with constant status updates or endless Candy Crush invites, we can all live with that right? I’m talking about a burgeoning increase of entitlement and self-centeredness among users that equate people liking their pictures and commenting on their statuses to being the source of all things knowledge and information when events happen in our world. We saw this occur in spades in the week following the untimely death of Kevin Ward Jr. during an Empire Super Sprints race Saturday night at Canandaigua Motorsports Park in upstate New York. In the aftermath of this tragedy, social media exploded as people with opinions on both sides of the issue of whether or not NASCAR star Tony Stewart was at fault suddenly became racing experts, legal experts, morality experts, oh and in my case, radio programming experts. There’s nothing quite like people taking time out of their afternoon just to text in “you’re an idiot” while you’re doing your radio show. I bet dentists don’t have to know what that’s like. Anyway, I digress. Whether you think Stewart, A: suddenly went into Hulk Rage Mode and decided he’d had enough of young Mr. Ward so he was going to end the 20-year-old’s shenanigans by running him over with his sprint car. Or B: Planned to simply scare Ward by getting just close enough to put some fear in the young man, but in no way intended to hurt him only to then have tragedy strike when the kid was sucked under his tires. Or C: Stewart didn’t see Ward at all until the very last minute when it was too late to do anything about it. No matter what your opinion is, it’s just that, an opinion. It doesn’t make you an expert. You know how I know? Because experts in law, racing, and morality don’t spend all day posting and commenting on Facebook, they’re too busy out practicing law, or racing cars, and doing whatever it is experts in morality do during the week.
There is one person on this earth that really knows what happened that night in upstate New York, and that’s Stewart. The last time I checked, he wasn’t doing interviews, let alone updating his InstaGram. There are only two things that should matter to people like you and me – a young man’s life has been tragically cut short, and a brilliant racing career has been damaged possibly beyond repair. Stewart canceled his planned race at Plymouth Speedway Saturday night, as well as Sunday’s NASCAR race at Michigan International Speedway. My suggestion, and I’m following my own advice here as well, is that we take a moment and reflect on what this tragedy has done to these two men and their families and spend some real time in silent prayer rather than pressing “send.”
