Sticks and Stones

Something my nan always used to say to me. The next part of course is 'may break your bones but words will never hurt you'. Well actually times have changed and so called 'social media' is responsible for this, in my humble opinion. What do you think?

Think about it for a minute! It stills happens today, you get cross with someone and you say something that is a little unkind or a lot unkind or even worse someone picks on you for no reason. Well of course there is a reason, they may have been having a bad day or someone may have insulted them, you just never know what is happening in other people's worlds. So no broken bones but why say 'words will never hurt you'? I think it is all relative and comes down to the fact that the spoken word is transient, meaning that depending on the length of your memory you will have forgotten the nasty jibe by teatime or retorted with something so hateful that you win the fight! There are lots of platitudes here and most of them came out of my nan's mouth at some time or other. 'If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything', 'turn the other cheek' and my ultimate biblical favourite, which is ironic as she was a devout atheist, 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. I have tried to follow this advice and on the most part have succeeded, however I do have a younger sister and even now she knows how to push my buttons! Also she is the one person that I would break all my nan's rules for! That is just how it is and it works both ways. As a skinny kid with buck teeth and a penchant for reading it was going to take me a while to fit in to a new tough Essex primary, enter the hero, a slightly smaller and no messing 5 year old. I cannot remember which bully said something hateful but I do remember the consequences as my little sister pulped him or her? The spoken word may be transient but the consequences were not. Flash forward 40 years and I walk into a really tricky Essex pub where everyone except me is a local and guess what persuaded them to serve me? Yep, someone recognised me as the big sister of the person who had whipped the bully at primary. Actions speak louder than words, at the time I was humiliated but years later relieved! However, I am not advocating literally beating the bully!

So why do I think 'social' media is so 'anti-social'? It is because the written word is permanent. Whatever has been said is recorded and not only that it is then stored and shared. This is a relatively new phenomenon and some people just do not realise the consequences. There are obvious links to mental health as it does not rely on the person's memory of the fact but is there to be read over and over again to torment them! It does not seem possible that it was only in 1997 that the first social media site was introduced and let's face it back then very few people had access to a computer. Friends Reunited was launched in 2000 but it was just that, a way to meet up with old school friends. It was not until Facebook in 2004 that you could start to write messages to whole groups of people that you either knew or 'virtually' knew. Twitter followed in 2006 and I must admit that I use it when I am annoyed at a service, hashtag BR why is this train not moving? And I now use WhatsApp (2009) daily to communicate with whole groups of friends! In the past if someone had been nasty to me I may have told my little sister, for obvious reasons! I may also have written it in my diary but let's face it only if it happened in the first few days of January because after that I was bored with diary writing for the year! Now however I can spread the hate by telling over 50 people in 10 minutes how horrible someone has been to me. Those people are not just in the UK but also in the rest of Europe and the US. I am not stupid enough to share private info on Facebook but if I did I could reach thousands or millions!! I could go from being the victim to the bully in seconds without even meaning to, if I knew the name of the person. There is another issue, on 'social media' you can get hurt by people that you do not even know or even worse who are pretending to be someone else.

Thus said I love most social media and can behave responsibly. In fact even more responsibly than if I was face to face with someone, so maybe that is what needs to happen. To make social media 'social' people need to be kind and in the immortal words of my nan, 'if you do not have anything nice to say then do not say anything'!