Something's in the water...

This is somewhat ballsy of me to say, but if my phone accidentally fell into the ocean or off a high rise building, I almost wouldn’t be mad. Almost.

What I’m getting at is, I just really don’t care for my phone these days. When I was growing up in the 90s, all we had to rely on for news was the TV (or radio). These days, the access to every single piece of news is just overly convenient. There are obviously pros and cons to that. We have never been more informed than in this era of technology where everything is talked about the minute it happens. But you have to see that with too much information also comes with too much misinformation.

I had a convo with a friend about how if it wasn’t for TikTok and Twitter, we wouldn’t know about a lot of the dangers that linger, like fugitives or armed and dangerous people lurking around. That might be true, but the problem with social media information is that information is almost always spread PREMATURELY. Not enough details of the incident is known and it can cause widespread panic and misinformation. In the case of fugitives or missing persons, misinformation can do so much damage and cause more danger. When you cause panic, especially in America, it usually leads to some very selfish behavior (i.e. buying literally everything off the shelves during the Pandemic.)

When Gabby Petito was missing, I was all about that shit. True crime is also one of my favorite things to watch, so naturally I was part of the crowd that was way too invested in that case. However, so many cases like Gabby’s don’t get the media spotlight, and in that case, it’s a good example of how social media did bad AND good. It helped with finding her murderer, but it spread a lot of misinformation and by the very nature of it going viral, it left other cases in shadows. And the way people pick and choose what lives they deem more important than others, is dehumanizing.

When it comes to social media and the way people behave, there definitely is something in the water.