Social media extremes
As a communication major and a recent student of social semiology, I have been interested in the effects of social media on the individual and society. Then I had a chat last weekend with colleagues in the Mass Communication program of UP Cebu about the scathing public comments in social media against our alumna, Myles Albasin.
Myles, 21, has been in the news after being arrested last Saturday together with five others during an alleged military operation against suspected communist rebels in Negros Oriental. She was once my student in 2013 if I remember the year right.
Criminal charges were already filed last Sunday against her and her companions. Knowing Myles as a student, also described by her friends as "a charming morena, unassuming and gentle" yet intelligent and strong in her beliefs, it is wise to leave it to Myles to defend her person and her honor as she is also entitled to due process.
Going back to the topic of user comments and public opinion in social media, I told my colleagues to ignore the comments about Myles in social media. These comments were, in fact, not confined to expressing contrary views, many were really cruel, frightening, and hateful.
"They are a waste of time," I exclaimed.
Online public forums tend to cater to our raw feelings and otherwise concealed prejudices.
"Kabantay mo, it's your emotion that is usually affected when reading online comments?" I said.
In social semiology and multimodality of communication, I subscribe to the theory that the traditional modes of writing on a piece of paper, sending a letter to the editor, speaking and gesturing in public forum, talking to a person across the table or beside you -are still the most reliable avenues toward productive and meaningful communication.
For example, people I used to dislike online for their cheesiness or abrasiveness turned out to be nice persons when I got to interact with them personally, owing to the multimodal aspects of personal interactions (aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual).
Many argue that people today have become worse as typically seen in the dystopia of online communication. I say nothing really much has changed in people. It's just the online medium giving individuals an easy outlet for their inner monsters.
Online comments, particularly the public ones, are the worst indicators of public sentiment and consequential outcomes. That's why I have considered them, especially the negative ones that do not seek to inform, a waste of time.
The characteristics of the online technology itself may also have something to do with this. Relying on the instantaneous textual mode, like in the comments made online for instance, excludes the personal and social cues found in traditional media which, studies show, contributes to "flaming" and depersonalization.
In a peer-reviewed journal article entitled "User comments and public opinion: Findings from an eye-tracking experiment," Steinfield and Azran (2016) concluded that readers of news articles online view user comments as a realm characterized by biases, and thus, these did not affect their evaluation of the news articles.
On the other hand, in a published study done by Changjun Lee of the University College Dublin (2018) and two other researchers, they found out that increased political awareness and participation, as a result of social media use, "crystalizes individuals' political opinions and moves them further away from the moderate position." In other words, social media use increases political polarization.
As the researchers note, their findings indicate that we cannot treat social media use uniformly. "It is possible that only certain types of social media use are related to greater political participation."
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