Recently on ABC 20/20 program, I watched the interview with Dhanur Ravi. He was on the show as he had recently lost a court battle on a bullying case ending up receiving a 10-year prison sentence. The immediate questions were: Was it a right message but a wrong case? Was it a too harsh of a punishment? Did the bullying really cause the person to jump of the bridge to his death? Was it really a gay bashing?
Some of the other questions that went un-answered: Did anyone closely examine the troubled past of the person who died? With so much awareness about bullying and so much help available why the person failed to use these channels? What if the entire episode was played out as he-said-she-said scenario where Talk could not have been used as evidence? How could you have proved anything in the court that the bullying caused the tragic death if the Text or Tweet evidence was not there? Could you have barred the Text and Tweet evidence as not admissible to the court branding those types of conversation as quite common in the text-ing and the tweet-ing world? Did the media jump on the band-wagon of gay-bashing too soon by ignoring the fundamental right of any person as ‘presumed innocent till proven guilty’?
We have seen the YouTube videos going viral and then disappearing from the horizon the very next day; we have seen Tweets destroying lives of congressman and senators; we have seen text-ing destroying lives of sports personalities; we have seen corporations being built just to dig the dirt on candidates campaigning for the highest office; we have seen the negative campaigning taking the center stage and overheard conversations taken out of context to build a different picture of a person. Is this what we need to construct the nations in the 21st century? Is this the way we go about doing business in 21st century? Is this the way we need to be portrayed ourselves as intelligent human beings?
I am not sure whether I can provide answers to any of those questions. However, what I would like to do and can do is to urge the readers to come up with their own questions and to give some thoughts to what is being posed here as questions, pause for a little while to digest the events and their impacts on our lives and take ever so small corrective steps to nudge the world to civility that we all crave to have deep inside but feel helpless to do anything about it.
The written matter in the text-ing world and the tweet-ing world are nothing but noise rather than the real signals; they are nothing but the conversations of the moment than the commandments etched in stone; they are nothing but exchanges of no value as that of he said-she said; however, they remain there forever, haunting us over a long period of time when the diggers of dirt use them to make mountains of mole hill.
Take care – Engage in Talk before Text-ing, and, before Tweet-ing.