When I discovered that through social media I was able to reach out to my distant family and friends, I was tremendously happy. Being able to communicate to family I have not seen in years, was emotional. I started receiving requests from friends I went to school and friends from all over the place I thought I was never going to hear from again. The remembrance of my high school years and knowing that they thought of me was beyond words. The first years checking out my social media was exciting. I was seeing my cousins, nephews, and all the members of the family growing up, getting old and showing their trips and new cars. My social media kept me busy and I felt I shared with them their success and their sorrows. Unfortunately, there is always one who loves to share their political and religious inner thoughts and the social media becomes anything but social.
The special one always tends to forget, that when one opens the Pandora box of politics and religion, it becomes a sensitive subject. The subjects sometimes are so sensitive that it becomes a war of words. And, sometimes it becomes so deep in words, that they forget that they are relatives or friends and somehow they forget that when one writes, one has to think of the reader. The message gets exposed to everyone and each individual reading the personal opinion, could sense that they are receiving a weapon to start a war of words in Social Media. But the most authentic subject they forget is to respect.
The freedom we now have of writing and being able to express whatever comes to mind has a huge price. We have to understand that if we take the risk of writing our personal opinion on social media, we either are going to receive controversial opinions and/or going to be insulted by our readers who do not agree with our personal opinions. The unconventional situation is when a close relative answers that opinion with a personal opinion, which is when the war of words in social media starts.
Words go back and forward being the entertainment of friends and family who are laughing out loud noticing the lack of respect for each other. This would be another price to pay for being ridiculed. The worst part of this war in social media is that we stop being social and we get distant with our family and friends.
Let’s remember that the social media was created to be social. Let’s remember that social media has all types of readers and at the end of every conversation, we would like to remain respected and sociable.
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