Hashtag, Gadget-Mastery

In case you missed it, here’s what happened:

This past Friday Justine Sacco, a PR director at InterActiveCorp, was boarding an eleven-hour flight from London to Cape Town. Just as the announcement was made to power down all electronic devices she tweeted this to her 200 followers:

Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I’m white!

In the amount of time it took her to get to her destination (during which she obviously had no internet access), BuzzFeed picked up the story, and before long it, and her name, were trending in South Africa and eventually worldwide (a Miami women assigned the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet), and despite conservative accusations of a “witch-hunt,” Sacco’s name was tweeted 30,000 times and there were 100,000 uses of her hashtag. Once she landed and realized the uproar, she deleted her Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts and eventually issued an apology.

Did I mention she’s a PR director? As in, public relations? OK, just checking.

Anyway, my point here is not to re-hash the story or to delve into the issue of racism/racial insensitivity. Instead I would simply take this opportunity to rant against a trend in technology that has bothered me since the mid-’90s and increasingly annoys me with every new advance in our technological abilities:

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Whether we’re talking about the Internet in general or things like Twitter or CGI and 3-D in cinema in particular, the fact is that stuff is just, like, way easier to do now than it used to be. You can communicate a thought to hundreds of people in the blink of an eye, you can post a selfie with the tap of a couple buttons, a filmmaker can embed a movie based on a charming children’s book like The Hobbit  with so much computer-generated back-story that it becomes nine hours long (“Watch this: Click. See that? Just made forty million Orcs. Easy-peasy!”).

But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

We as a culture have not yet had the chance to grow into our tech, to mature into responsible masters of our gadgets, but instead we become their slaves and let them master us (just ask Anthony Weiner). We’re like little children with no self-control. We insist upon publishing for all the world to see whatever banal, inane, racist, or idiotic thought that passes from our minds to our fingertips, completely unchecked and unfiltered. We do, since we can.

(Now that I think about it, how many relationships suffer from over-texting, from relaying thoughts that, if they had to be written down in a letter and mailed with a stamp, would have mercifully remained unvoiced? As the old adage says, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open’s one’s mouth and dispel all doubt.”)

Think first, tweet later. Hit Pause. Ask yourself whether you really need to post a pic of your food before you eat it, or whether sitting on the toilet is really the best time to take a selfie. And for God’s sake, if you value your job and reputation, never hold your iPhone in one hand and your willie in the other.