The many faces of social media

Practically every day there are news about current issues and how they fit in new, social media. Most current news relate to the post-election protests in Iran. Everyone following the media and keeping up with YouTube and other forums in social media have seen images of a beautiful young woman, Neda Soltani shot in Teheran. Several people took pictures and videos of the deeply unfortunate incident at site, and within the next hours these images were visible for the whole world. The same time the Iranian government minimizes, if not denies the debth of the protests and violence in Iran.

It is a whole new world with news spreading faster than light around the world. A headline in the Finnish national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat used even a complete new term for this: "Camera society" (HS 29th of May 2009). People film things for their own pleasure, and some end up downloading their findings in various forums. I would want to believe that most people are decent enough to carry out proper common sense and also sense of morality in contents that involve other people than themselves. This is of course not always the case.

Mr. Antti Miettinen, reporting to Helsingin Sanomat from London brought an interesting point about social media and cameraphones in his article on 18th of April 2009. In his view people don't just explore their easy-to-use devices and social media at times of conflicts (such as rallies and demonstrations) but as a new sort of a "weapon". Civil cameras capture incidents of police officers using extra porpotion of power to take down protesters, but nowadays they are also used to promote violence.

Mr. Miettinen saw himself a situation where a man was deliberately teasing a police dog in the riots in London in April. The police dog (and the officer holding it) finally got enoughafter a while, and the dog attacked the man. The bitemark was clearly deep and needed treatment, but the man stayed "on stage" so that as many people as possible could capture him on film. Story does not tell what happened to the police officer, who allowed the dog to bite. Point was, that people are even willing to sacrifice themselves physically to serve the hungry ones for scandals in social media.

If carrying out decent journalistic ethics is extremely important for professional journalists it should be required from ordinary people as well. Social media is a fantastic tool and instrument for many phenomenons in the world, especially for democracy, human rights, freedom and social justice. And of course, simply for fun things. But it needs to be used correctly. Social media starts working against itself, if it is abused to twist the truth and absolute facts about any given incident. Social media has to be used when any type of violence against any living creature is happening anywhere in the world, but it is absolutely wrong to create violence as means to be seen in social media.