I can only imagine what it was like. A new and loud device was installed in the house. It had it’s own table maybe with a beautiful lace doily, just to brighten it up or maybe it was on the wall–you know, with those early adopters. The young people in the home were excited. But the folks who had done just fine, thank you, without one–well, they were not so happy. 
I know my mom, who was born 11 years after women got the vote, grew up without a phone in the house when she was young.
I know that now she’s an avid Facebook user and can text better than any other person in their 80s, except maybe my hero Senator Dianne Feinstein. Dianne can do anything, including getting a pacemaker and being back at work two days later, but….I digress.
But still. Not everyone adapts. Not everyone gets used to the new things like my mom. Electric lights over gas lights? Electric typewriter over manual? Running water over a hand pump. OK, not that one. Everyone likes that one. But when the telephone came along, I know that not everyone was happy.
It’s like that with social media. Today. Now. With people who should know better.
You cannot post a big, loud, statement that brings huge commentary without curating the comments and spinoffs. If you’re going to make an inflammatory tweet, or Facebook or Instagram post, you have to stay in the conversation.
I am absolutely certain that there were phone calls that went along the lines of a loud lecture and ended with a click of the receiver. I’m sure that sometimes there was not a conversation. There was the delivery of a message. Click. That’s it. Period.
When people told that new telephone user that you were supposed to stay ON the telephone to have some back and forth with the person you had reached out to communicate with; that it was rude and just not acceptable to just holler your statement into the telephone and then hang up, folks didn’t understand. They said “when I write a letter, there’s no back and forth” or “that’s just what you think, this is how I am doing this” there might have been some frustration. Some angst.
That’s what I see today. On social media.
New users, or newish users will throw out an inflammatory statement that brings about hundreds of comments, some downright nasty, and they will just stay the hell out of it.
“I said my piece, I’m out.”
But they’re not. On social media you can’t just post and then check out. When you dump a big, explosive thing onto social media and then just let the flames build, that’s your fault. You did that.
If you don’t want to curate and tend, then do not post. It’s that simple. You don’t have to continue to engage. Lord knows sometimes silence is the most powerful message. But you have to at least answer questions and respond when someone points out abusive trolls and inflammatory language. That’s the bare minimum.
Today I removed an inappropriate comment from a post I made on Facebook. It was a comment that made no sense, by someone who was not a friend or a friend of a friend. They assumed when I said GA I meant Georgia, when almost anyone who knows me at all knows that I am going to New Orleans for an org’s General Assembly–GA. So, not worth engaging. I removed the comment and changed the privacy to Friends. Because who cares?
Later in the day I was tagged in a pretty inflammatory comment about the emerging candidates in our upcoming congressional primary on our district Indivisible Facebook page. Yes, I had to respond to that. I am a huge fan of one candidate (GO TEAM LAURA!) but this page is not the place to campaign or disparage one of the other candidates. So I took some time to reflect and carefully craft my response. I would not have even looked at the comment if I were not tagged, but I was. So I did. And I responded as best I could. Flames doused, tempers cooled. All good.
That’s current common decency. That’s polite public discourse. That is how we behave. Or how responsible, caring, people respond.
We do not write explosive commentary and then check out. That, friends, is not OK.
If you are going to write something important on social media, you must stay in the conversation, at a minimum to reduce the harm you may cause, at best, to bring meaningful dialogue and discourse.
Where I grew up, just past the place where the glaciers scraped the Midwest prairies flat, you can sometimes see a storm coming all day long. A look out the window shows the clouds forming, and you can probably still get the wash out hung out on the line with plenty of time for it to dry.
I drove to San Diego yesterday, roughly a three hour round trip during a quiet weekday. The sky was clear blue and the sweeping turns with nothing but ocean in view made me smile, right there, alone in my car.
