By Chuks Oluigbo & Mabel Dimma
Chukwuma, a full-grown adult with a wife and three children, lost his mother recently. On the day of his mother’s burial when he was expected to be in a sober mood mourning the woman who bore, suckled and nurtured him from infancy through adulthood, he was busy flooding Facebook with pictures of her lifeless body as she lay in state.
As repulsive as this action was, the posts gathered many likes, with his numerous Facebook friends seizing the moment to, for the umpteenth time, extend their condolences to him. And he found the time to like every comment on the posts and even reply some.
But not everyone liked Chukwuma’s action. Someone wrote on one of the posts, “Some human beings have lost it, I swear. Maybe it’s time to go on our knees and ask Whatever-We-Believe-In to restore our senses to their pre-social media status.”
Growing trend
Chukwuma’s action is just one among numerous anti-social behaviours that are manifesting themselves on social media platforms.
The advent and proliferation of social media has democratized information dissemination and the way people communicate with their loved ones. It has also created jobs for a lot of people and opened up new vistas of opportunities in the technology space. Most entrepreneurs no longer need physical addresses to connect with customers. The fact that pictures can be shared on these sites has made communication more interesting to both the originator and receiver of the posts/messages. Pictures of graduation, wedding, housewarming, childbirth, pregnancy, and much more are shared on these platforms, affording several family members and friends who cannot be physically present at the event to partake real time via these platforms.
On the reverse side, however, social media has brought along with it a new lifestyle that is dangerous as individuals live their daily lives online, flaunting every new purchase, relationship and achievement in the open. But the most disturbing is the near absolute freedom on social media that has made it possible for content that would otherwise be banned in the mainstream media to now find its way into the public domain.
Someone stumbles on an accident scene. Several bodies are littered everywhere, some stone dead, limbs and other body parts scattered here and there; others still oozing fresh blood but conscious nonetheless, with chances of survival if given immediate attention. But that’s not the concern of this young man or lady. Rather than call for help, they pick up their phone, activate the camera and take several shots of fellow human beings, both dead and dying, and post on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, and the countless other available platforms.
That was how the picture of the butchered body of Eunice Elisha, a 42-year-old mother of seven and an assistant pastor with the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), who was murdered while preaching around Gbazango-West area of Kubwa in the Bwari Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), circulated like wildfire, just like that of Mayowa Ahmed, an ovarian cancer patient who eventually lost the battle, in her lowest moments.
Reacting to this trend, Jen Ebere, a concerned Facebook user, lamented on her timeline sometime ago, “I don’t understand why Nigerians delight in decorating their timelines with graphic pictures of dead bodies. You wake up to all manner of gruesome pictures of accident victims and victims of vicious attacks. See, listen up, this is not right… Even the dead deserve some respect.”
A psychologist who does not want to be named says these anti-social behaviours are pointers that the society is progressively losing its humanity.
“We have lost that aspect of us that makes us empathise with others in their time of difficulty or need, and we have supplanted it with a callous, unthinking, unfeeling cruelty. We have lost our sense of the sacred. We have no respect for the living; we have no respect for the sick, the dying and the dead,” said the psychologist.
“It is mean, cruel and demeaning to post pictures of fellow human beings in their weakest and most vulnerable state. It is as if death has been demystified before us all, that we have seen so many deaths in the last few years, in the hands of Boko Haram and the herdsmen, in Syria, in South Sudan, in several other places, that we no longer care,” he said.
Fertile ground for criminals
Experts have warned that while it is good to share pictures and other information with friends online, it makes more sense to be cautious and look for more private and intimate ways of sharing such details to those you want to.
They warn that it is not only regular people that live on the internet. Murderers, wife-beaters, scammers, thieves, kidnappers, paedophiles, child-molesters and rapists also use the internet for their sick motives. Robbers and individuals with negative intent have been reported to go online to pick their victims, stalk them, and eventually either kidnap or defraud them. They are able to do this courtesy of the information the victims share online.
On the heels of multiple attacks in the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May called for stricter internet regulations with her government criticizing WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging services for providing terrorists with a “secret place to communicate”.
There is a message currently circulating on social media that the arrested kidnap kingpin, Chukwudi Onwuamadike (aka Evans) confessed that he got all the information he needed for all his kidnaps from Facebook; that all he needed to do was have a good look at the victim’s profile, close friends and family pictures and all the information was set – from children’s school uniform to people abroad taking pictures that they are on the way to Nigeria and family network on Facebook.
The message is accompanied by a note, “Even if you are not a kidnapper, some information some stupid people post and display on Facebook is enough for you to start getting ideas. People are just irresponsible when it comes to the social media. Place of work, home address, phone number, parents’ names, children’s names and pictures. Are you cursed? Easy target you are! Do you know the implication of what you are doing? Be careful what you post on your Facebook.”
Impact on youth population
Ace broadcaster Eugenia Abu, in a 2015 article ‘Pay attention to your children’, lamented that trans-border data flows, globalisation and the challenge of social media had led many children and youths into identity crisis – not knowing who they are, where they are and where they are going.
“The inability and difficulty to regulate the social media can lead to increased citizen journalism, unhealthy trends and false information that can spread like wildfire. It has ensured that in-depth analysis of information which used to be available when multimedia was limited is now no longer en vogue. So it is free entry and free exit,” Abu said.
“Checks and balances are mostly non-existent. Editorial judgment is totally absent; therefore a piece of information which is inherently false arrives on the internet and is propagated as the truth by educated young persons, uneducated young persons, vulnerable persons, emotionally-traumatised persons and psychologically-depraved people. Our children live in a bubble of social media and even when you have the facts of the matter, or the analysis of it for that matter, they challenge you with the falsehood with confidence,” she said.
Need for parental control
Abu said the creators of these social media platforms, apps and other such-related internet matters knew there would be negatives but, however, expected control and discernment which, sadly, is not given to all millennial. She said it was not enough to provide these devices (phones, iPad) for children, but it was critical for parents to manage them, no matter how busy they are.
“In the past when we visited friends and family with one’s parents, we would be expected to conduct ourselves in respectful social manners that made us able to have conversations with uncles and aunties about our wellbeing, our future ambition, likes and dislikes. It allowed us to ask them about their welfare, connect with our cousins and children of our parents’ friends and establish family ties that last forever,” she said.
“Today, those visits make us nervous because today’s children while visiting an uncle are on their phones throughout and completely anti-social. They seem to be floating in and out of two different worlds and distracted by everyday normal conversation. You would have to repeat yourself several times to get their attention. They suffer several bouts of selective amnesia and are not firmly rooted in the real world,” Abu said.
Source: http://www.businessdayonline.com/social-medias-anti-social-inhabitants/
