Social Media Archives

Why I Don’t Just Unfriend Him

May 5, 2017

By Christie Tate

“You can just unfriend him. At least hide his profile.”

This is good advice, advice I’d be well served to take. I’ve just told my best friend about the latest offense my Tea Party pro-Trump second-cousin has committed on social media. This cousin triggers me to the moon with his red state propaganda. I haven’t laid eyes on him since my grandfather’s funeral in 1981. I was in third grade. I remember only that his face was wide and flat like the surface of the moon. We share the same last name and a handful of relatives that I’m not close to. We were “reunited” on Facebook a few months ago when my first cousin put me in touch with his daughter.

I didn’t know he was a pro-Trump guy at first. The posts were all about his grandbaby and his beloved Texas Aggies. Babies I can get behind 100% of the time; the Aggies I could take or leave.

Then, over the summer the Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas erupted in gun violence and police officers were killed in the line of duty. I posted something that was pro Black Lives Matter, and his response was racist, offensive, anti-Constitutional, and impossible to ignore. I held my phone and in that tiny square for REPLY I told him why Black Lives Matter was important and that he was wrong about who was to blame for the violence. I cited numerous incidents were young black men were killed at the hands of trigger-happy, racist police officers. After I published my remark, I shook like someone soaking wet in a snow storm. Had I just taken this man with my father’s smile to task? Was I now in trouble? I was 43 years old, sitting in the office where I work as a lawyer, shaking like I’d just thrown a Molotov cocktail through an elderly person’s window. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Social Media

How Social Media Killed My Memories

February 1, 2017

By Nilanjana Bhowmick

Over-dependence on digital media to store memories is depleting them. We think we are creating memories, but we are in fact killing them. Our memories are more transient than ever before. They have never been as threatened before. As I found out when I lost the ability to see for two weeks.

On a patchy, unremarkable April evening, I was on my way to consult my doctor for a nagging migraine. I was sitting in the car, with temperatures threatening to climb over 45 degrees outside. The air conditioning in my car had given up the pretense of cooling. The car right in front was emitting black smoke in a thin spiral. Delhi’s bumper-to-bumper traffic refused to budge. The buzz of the daily, local market grew around me as did the swirling crowds. They dropped off and picked up, dropped off and picked up in their own lazy rhythm of heat-induced inertia. The steering wheels were sweating out the smug heat and the incessant, impatient honking. Snippets of a Bollywood song was floating in from an auto rickshaw with a garish pink interior. The driver was lip-syncing to the song. A romantic song I remember from my childhood. A man singing to his lover that her pink eyes were intoxicating.

The day would turn out to be one of the most momentous days of my life.

Later that evening the lights started dimming in front of my eyes and the world went down into deep shadows. I lost the ability to see for a whole two weeks. Just like that. Without the warning of an illness or accident. I should have remembered the day I went blind more vividly. But I don’t. My memories of that evening that you just read above are purely second-hand.

I remember them from my status updates on social media and a few pictures on my phone. Because I, like many many others of my generation of 30-40 year olds, was a victim of digital amnesia. Continue Reading…